District 9 is Awesome

I haven't done movie reviews since writing for my high school newspaper, but I can't pass this one up.

District 9 is awesome. Straight up. Here's why:

You might read that and ask yourself, 'Wait, a movie about aliens? Realistic?' Oh yes. Well, as long as you take for granted the premise that an alien spaceship has brought a colony of crab-like beings to Johannesburg, South Africa, where they have been quarantined into an area that becomes a slum, have super-powerful weapons that only they can use, and when exposed to a certain substance, humans can turn into them. Got all that? Great.

What makes this movie realistic is the way the situation is handled. In District 9 of Johannesburg, where the aliens are quarantined, they have the same problems that humans do. They start running guns, form gangs, even get into inter-species prostitution (yuck!).

The humans act like humans always do when they encounter a group they deem inferior: they treat them horribly. "Racism," or whatever you want to call it, against the aliens manifests itself in the term "prawn," because of their physical similarity to the crustacean. Although these creatures have a language of their own, can communicate with humans, and show the same capacity to think and feel emotion, they are treated like animals.

I will concede that there is a heavy dose of preachyness. The film is begging for the comparison with the way Jews were treated in the Holocaust, and is not far off from the way Africans, Native Americans, and Asians have been treated throughout history by European settlers. But it's a dose of truth. Historically, this is how humans act, time and time again.

The way the film is shot adds to this aspect of realism. It is a sort of "mockumentary;" it is shot not with grand, colorful panoramas, but as if a normal person filmed it using a camera from Best Buy. Even in the scenes that are not included in the mockumentary, the picture seems somewhat worn out, the polar opposite of films like Transformers or G.I Joe.

Although the movie is not necessarily about a war, the central force that clamps down on the aliens is a private military contracting (PMC) company called Multi-National United, tasked with moving them at gunpoint to a new, smaller quarantined district. I have thought that PMCs are a subject that would make an awesome movie for a long time. These companies, which are more or less mercenaries, have been used to fight countless battles in Africa and are currently used in the Middle-East, and are very real.

The film portrays them perfectly as tough, uncaring, unfeeling soldiers who shoot first and ask questions later because it's what they're paid to do. They are equipped with the most modern weapons technology, yet are not bound to the rules that a national army is. This makes for a great battle in the end of the film against equally-cool alien weaponry. If I would change one thing it would be that this battle scene seems to take too much pleasure in the gore that modern special effects can display, but the scene itself is, well, awesome.

The tired old story of an invasion by technologically superior aliens bent on destroying the world until a valiant American saves the day, culminating in a fade-away shot of the hero kissing a beautiful woman just doesn't fly anymore. Our obsession with alien contact always leads us to paranoia: what if they want to attack us? What if they are more powerful than us? Oh no!

Instead, the aliens in District 9 arrive malnourished and hungry, as any living being would be after spending too much time on a spacecraft with limited food. They have an obsession with eating cat food, a quirky, yet interesting inclusion to the film that only helps make them seem more real. There are good and bad aliens, those who dream and those who are cruel.

They are not exactly pretty to look at, and in the beginning I told myself that I would have a very difficult time sympathizing with one of those things. By the end, I was pulling for Christopher Johnson, the main alien character, with all my heart.

If you haven't yet seen District 9, see it. It's awesome.