MOVIE REVIEW: District 9

If you are a young teen (12-15) or the parent of such a creature, disregard the rest of this review and drive (or, for God's sake, get driven) to Castlegar to see District 9 immediately. Not after dinner—now! Never have I taken my sons to a film that engendered such a strong 'right on' response in them as this one did: both rank it among their top movies of all time. (if you're interested, Son Number Two ranks it number one while Son Number One ranks it number two on their respective lists: numerologists take note. Scientologists take note as well, given that District 9's tale of aliens and salvation makes for a nice fit with that group's theology)

Briefly put, District 9 is one of that new breed of movie: the fake documentary (do we want our movies now to look like our reality TV shows???). Shot largely by handheld cameras, the film tells the tale of a near-future world where a giant spaceship containing a million or so aliens has become stranded over Johannesburg, South Africa. The stranded aliens have been ferried down to earth and established in a shanty town beneath their ship, where they proceed to breed and interact somewhat dysfuncionally with the xenophobic human population.

The plot plays out as the story of a less-than-lovable administrator who, tasked with the job of relocating the unpopular 'prawns' (the refugees look like they belong on top of a very large bed of sushi rice) to a new camp, gets sprayed with a mysterious liquid that starts to change him into a Prawn even as the aliens try to get back the mystery liquid, which is their only hope of escaping Earth and returning home..

Beyond that it's all bug splats and entrails. And a peculiar sort of splatting and disembowelling. As a conneseur of such films back in my youth, I'd have to say the special effects are fairly 1980s—that it to say low tech and sort of intentionally so: the orchestration of human-alien combat is fairly tongue in cheek and the flying guts don't seem intended to provoke shock or disgust so much as cheers. This campiness is not necessarily a bad thing in a genre (the sci-fi message film) that is usually deadly earnest (and, as a result, deadly boring). In this regard, I'm reminded somewhat of the greatly underrated 1997 film Starship Troopers or of the original Robocop.

There are holes in the plot—there are always holes in the plot with these sorts of films. The story is supposed to be a documentary, as noted above, but it contains a good number of scenes that are clearly 'private' and not documentary at all. The behaviour of the aliens doesn't make a lot of sense, but my sons insist this is intentional and all will be revealed in the inevitable ''District 10'' sequel.

The movie's central message that 'humans don't cotton much to folks who are different' came across as fairly trite to me, but to a pair of very young men, it's ''heavy'' indeed. Watching my sons love this film I was reminded of my own childhood love of movies like The Omega Man (before it got remade as I am Legend with poor Will Smith trying to fill the Moses-sized shoes of Charlton Heston) or Planet of the Apes (the first time round, thank you very much!) and books like Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End or Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Those works of art got my adolescent brain working hard, got me thinking about ideas and about justice while thrilling me on a visceral level.

And while that sort of thing doesn't quite work for me any more, watching my sons experience something similar in District 9 made for a very happy family evening at the movies.