The story of wayward extraterrestrials who receive a less-than-welcoming reception from us Earthlings is a Hollywood trope whose roots can be traced back to movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and persists in District 9. District 9 is the latest incarnation of the familiar tale and this time, the giant mothership comes to a halt over Johannesburg and carries a sizable crew of half-starved insectoid aliens that soon acquire the derogatory appellation of “prawns”. How the prawns came to Earth is never clearly explained, but the South Africans set about repeating their history by placing the aliens in a segregated shantytown known as District 9. The movie picks up twenty years later as the government is preparing to forcibly move the aliens to a larger detention facility hundreds of miles away from the unfriendly and suspicious population of Johannesburg.
District 9 could have been a tired retread of better science fiction movies, but it manages to give homage to those movies while making a lasting impression of its own. The movie veers from standard Hollywood fare by making most of the major human characters pretty unsympathetic. The protagonist is a loathsome mid-level bureaucrat who regards the prawns with thinly disguised contempt. And the aliens are decidedly alien; the movie makes no attempt to turn them into cuddly pieces of merchandise. The story also draws clear parallels with not only apartheid, but all the ill-fated attempts to segregate a minority population from the majority.
District 9 also succeeds at being a raucously fun summer popcorn movie. Besides the aliens (who are some of the most expertly rendered CGI characters I’ve seen so far), the movie has plenty of gunplay, badass alien weaponry, giant robots, and chase scenes. This is the best original science fiction film since Children of Men and obligatory viewing for any fan of the genre.
