Introduction
Grab your remotes and clear your schedules, because tonight we are revisiting District 9, the gritty 2009 sci-fi flick directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. Set in an alternate reality Johannesburg, the story follows an extraterrestrial mothership that broke down over South Africa in the 1980s, stranding over a million insect-like aliens on Earth. Decades later, these unwanted intergalactic squatters are shoved into a squalid slum, while a private military conglomerate tries to monetize their alien weaponry and evict them further out of town.
Enter Wikus van de Merwe, a pencil-pushing bureaucrat who gets sprayed by alien goo on eviction day and immediately starts morphing into one of the creatures he was trying to kick to the curb. What follows is a violent, manic blend of shaky-cam pseudo-documentary and full-blown Hollywood shoot-em-up. It is sharp, relentless, and completely unbothered by good manners, making it one of the most distinctive science fiction movies to come out of the 2000s.
Review by Ben Dover
Listen to me, people. I am sixty years old, I yell at kids when they park their electric scooters across my driveway, and I do not like people telling me what to watch. My nephew spent three weeks begging me to stream this on my flat-screen TV instead of watching my evening cable reruns. He kept using nonsense words like “metaphorical socio-political commentary.” Give me a break. It is a movie about giant bipedal roaches living in tin shacks and eating canned cat food. If you want a deep sociology class, go pay college tuition. But if you want to watch mercenaries get liquefied by lightning guns, sit your rear end down on the recliner.
Here is the thing that actually made me respect this movie: it does not hold your hand. Wikus van de Merwe starts the movie as an insufferable dork in a sweater vest who thinks eviction notices are polite business management. You want to punch him five minutes in. But when his arm turns into a grotesque shell claw and his own father-in-law tries to cut his organs out for profit, the guy suddenly grows a backbone. He is selfish, he screams like a maniac, he panics, and he betrays people before he finally decides to do the right thing. Modern movies love giving us pristine boy scouts who preach to the audience. Wikus is a flawed, panicking dirtbag, which makes him feel like an actual human being for once.
Now, do not get too excited, because I still hated plenty of it. First off, what is with this modern camera work? The cameraman runs around like he is having a sugar crash after eating five donuts. It is mockumentary style, then regular action movie, then news footage. Pick a style and stick with it, Blomkamp! I had to look away twice just so my dinner did not come back up. And the romance stuff with the wife crying on the rotary phone felt pasted in so the studio could pretend there was a tender side to an hour and a half of people exploding into strawberry jam.
Even with the motion sickness and the gross-out bodily fluids, this thing works because it has guts. It treats both the humans and the aliens like stubborn, selfish jerks who cannot get along, which is the most honest thing any sci-fi flick has done in forty years. It never gets soft, it never gets preachy, and it keeps moving like a freight train.
Cast & Characters
- Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe: Before this film, Copley was not even a working Hollywood actor, which explains why he feels so real and unpolished. He starts out as an annoying little bureaucrat who sucks up to his bosses and ends up running around Johannesburg covered in alien gunk.
- Jason Cope as Christopher Johnson:Cope provided the motion-capture and clicks for Christopher, the main alien who happens to possess the only functioning brain cell in the entire township.He also played the background TV reporters and several other characters.
- David James as Colonel Koobus Venter:A totally unhinged private security boss who lives to turn aliens into target practice. He is mean, nasty, and impossible to sympathize with, making him a blast to root against.
- Eugene Khumbanyiwa as Obesandjo: The local gang boss who trades firearms for canned cat food and wants to eat alien appendages to absorb their superpowers.
- Louis Minnaar as Piet Smit: Wikus’s cold-blooded father-in-law and the corporate executive who sells out Wikus the instant he realizes the guy’s DNA can fire alien weapons.
Special Effects & Music
The visual effects in this film embarrass Hollywood movies that cost three times as much. Made for around thirty million dollars, the digital models for the “Prawn” aliens actually carry tangible physical weight. They blend seamlessly into real sunlight, actual dust, and filthy garbage heaps without looking like plastic cartoon cutouts. When the heavy alien machinery and mechs show up in the third act, the mechanical action looks filthy and real.
The score by Clinton Shorter skips standard orchestral horns for tribal drums, taiko percussion, and dark synthesizers. It keeps the rhythm pounding and gives the shantytown a hot, chaotic atmosphere that never lets you relax.
Rating
4 out of 5 Stars
Forget tiny green men, these aliens will trade high-tech ray guns for a carton of Friskies.
Complete Synopsis and Plot Breakdown
In 1982, a colossal extraterrestrial spacecraft halts over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. After weeks of dead silence, human crews cut inside to find a starving, leaderless population of insect-like aliens. The South African government herds them into a fenced encampment named District 9. Over the following decades, the shantytown deteriorates into an overcrowded slum ridden with crime, illegal black markets run by Nigerian gang leaders, and simmering hostility from human locals. The aliens, derogatorily dubbed “Prawns,” are hooked on canned cat food and restricted from modern society.
Multi-National United (MNU), a private defense contractor tasked with managing the camp, organizes an operation to evict roughly 1.8 million aliens to a remote concentration site called Sanctuary Park. Mild-mannered bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe is put in charge of the field eviction. While inspecting the shack of a Prawn named Christopher Johnson, Wikus discovers a concealed canister. As he tinkers with it, the container sprays a mysterious black fluid directly into his face. Christopher and his child had spent twenty painstaking years purifying that fluid to provide enough fuel to power a command shuttle hidden beneath their floorboards.
Wikus falls violently ill shortly after the spray. His fingernails fall out, he vomits dark bile, and following a seizure at his celebratory promotion party, he collapses. Hospital staff cut away his bandages to discover his left arm has fully mutated into an alien claw. MNU immediately detains him. Company scientists quickly discover that alien weapons, which rely on extraterrestrial biology to activate, fire perfectly for Wikus. Recognizing that his unique DNA represents billions of dollars in weapon value, MNU director Piet Smit authorizes him to be vivisected.
Desperate for survival, Wikus fights his way out of the medical lab and escapes into the only place where security forces cannot easily hunt him: District 9. Meanwhile, MNU launches a smear campaign across national news, falsely claiming Wikus has contracted an alien venereal disease. In the camp, Wikus hides out with Nigerian gangsters, escapes their attempt to butcher his arm, and stumbles into Christopher Johnson’s home. Seeing the command craft under the floor, Wikus agrees to help Christopher retrieve the fuel canister from the fortified MNU headquarters in exchange for Christopher using his ship’s medical systems to reverse his mutation.
Arming themselves with black-market alien weapons, Wikus and Christopher storm the MNU complex, slaughtering security forces and recovering the fuel canister. Back in the slum, Christopher hooks the fuel into the escape module, but discloses that he must return to the alien homeworld to seek help for his enslaved people before he can treat Wikus, meaning a delay of three years. Infuriated, Wikus knocks Christopher unconscious and tries to fly the shuttle himself. Mercenary commander Koobus Venter shoots the module down, capturing Wikus and Christopher.
Before the convoy can leave, Nigerian gangsters ambush them and take Wikus hostage. Christopher’s young son remotely activates the shuttle systems, powering on a heavily armed bipedal alien mech suit inside the gang’s headquarters. Wikus clambers into the cockpit, obliterates the gangsters, and initially runs away. Overcome by conscience, he turns around to save Christopher from execution by MNU soldiers. Wikus uses the mech suit to slaughter Venter’s mercenaries, buying Christopher and his son enough time to reach the shuttle. Venter disables the mech, but before he can execute Wikus, a horde of neighborhood Prawns swarms Venter and tears him to pieces. Christopher and his boy dock with the massive mothership and depart into space, leaving District 9 behind. In the aftermath, the camp is dismantled, Wikus’s assistant exposes MNU’s horrific illegal experiments, and a fully transformed Wikus lives secretly in the new camp, fashioning metal roses out of scrap metal and leaving them on his wife’s porch.
5 Famous Quotes
- “When dealing with aliens, try to be polite, but firm. And always remember that a smile is cheaper than a bullet.”
- “Is that tear gas? No, it’s cat food!”
- “I mean, you can’t say they don’t look like that, that’s what they look like, right? They look like prawns.”
- “I will come back for you. Three years, I promise.”
- “I never had sex with a creature! I would never have sex with any creature!”
5 Notes & Interesting Facts
- Born from a Failed Video Game: Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson originally intended to make an adaptation of the video game Halo. When the funding collapsed, Jackson handed Blomkamp the remaining resources and told him to adapt his 2005 short film Alive in Joburg instead.
- Real-Life Apartheid History:The title and storyline directly mirror Cape Town’s District Six, a residential area declared “whites only” in 1966 that saw over 60,000 residents forcibly evicted by the South African government.
- Shot in an Actual Shantytown: The District 9 sets were filmed in Chiawelo, an impoverished section of Soweto, during a real eviction and re-housing program, which gave the dust, debris, and tin roofs authentic grit.
- Massive Improvised Dialogue: Sharlto Copley had zero professional acting credits before landing the lead role. He and director Blomkamp improvised almost all of Wikus’s nervous interviews and ramblings without a traditional locked script.
- The Cat Food Addiction: The aliens’ obsession with canned cat food was inspired by the real Parktown prawn, a large king cricket native to South Africa that often enters houses and eats pet food.
Photos
