Review of District 9 (2009) by Mark F — 09 Feb 2016

District 9 is a film that I've always kind of dreaded watching because I heard it was trying to make a statement about Apartheid in South Africa. I've never been a fan of movies that make a point instead of telling a story. What I found when I actually watched District 9 is that it has a very solid story and doesn't hinge on you knowing anything about that time period in that place. It's a very engaging movie about a race of aliens that have arrived on Earth and the government pretends to welcome them, but offers them very shoddy accommodations in slums and discriminates against them tremendously. Naturally, this makes the aliens the sympathetic characters that we root for throughout the movie. The main human character is played brilliantly by Sharlto Copley. He perfectly portrays a goofy government worker who genuinely thinks he's doing the right thing by evicting the aliens and forcing them to relocate to a different facility (which we find out is even worse.) His arc throughout the film is amazing, and he sells it in every scene. I can totally see his motivations and I buy into his performance completely.

By far, without question, my least favorite aspect of this movie is the way it meanders between film genres. It starts out trying to emulate a documentary, then it kind of transitions into a found-footage film, and finally it settles on a more traditional movie where we simply observe events unfolding. But then they randomly throw in more documentary interviews so the whole thing doesn't gel at all. I wish they would have opened with the news reports (because that was an excellent way of getting us up to speed on the history of this world) and then just gone with a traditional film throughout. Most of the other interviews were superfluous, and the found-footage bits had no good reason to be filmed that way. On the flip side of that my absolute favorite part of this film was the CGI. The aliens looked so realistic in almost every scene that I started to question if they were a combination of guys in costumes and CGI. I wish every film that included CGI characters could attain this level of quality because I completely bought into the realism of this world. Mostly, the good outweighs the bad for me in District 9, and I could even see myself wanting to watch it again because the story is so well crafted.