District 9

Aug 2009, Neill Blomkamp, 112 mins

District 9, a film starring nobody, with a plot unlike anything I’ve ever seen, may just end up being the best popcorn movie of the summer. With a relatively minuscule budget of $30 million, D-9 pulls of a feat that many other films have failed at this summer, show some humanity. In a summer ruled by Alien robots and drunk mis-adventures in Vegas, who would of thought that a little Sci-Fi flick set in South Africa would even be a blip on the radar screen.

The film’s star, other then the cool and original styled aliens, is Sharlto Copley. Who is Sharlto Copley? I sure don’t know. Even on his IMDB page there is only one other acting credit for some project back in ‘05. Whoever the actor might be, his role as Wikus Van De Merwe, a sort of camp councelor for the stranded aliens is noteworthy. As the stiff and mild mannered Wikus, he acts with a sort of anti-intellegence much like Michael Scott in the British and American versions of The Office. You can’t not like him, even though his actions border on idiocracy.

The film, which never would have been made if writer/director Neil Blomkamp had landed his dream job at the helm of the much anticipated but derailed screen adaptation of the uber-popular video game series Halo, is also noteworthy. D-9 touches on a lot of human emotions due to the fact that the mistakes of its human characters directly mirror mistakes of true human history. The idea of being scarred of what we don’t know or don’t understand makes us a race of overly ethnocentric creatures. The sad last statement is the final moral meaning of the film and it poses the question, what does it take to accept and live with things we don’t fully understand?

In the end, D-9 has enough action for any fanboy and an engrossing enough screenplay to entertain the most critical of critics.