District 9 is a film about people. Well, people and aliens I guess. It is centered around the premise that an alien mother-ship crash-landed over Johannesburg around twenty years ago and there has been trouble ever since.
The film opens in a disconcerting documentary fashion. There are your standard news reels, street interviews and talking heads. All of them seem to point at the inhabitants of the ship as being immoral, predatory and most important of all, expensive to care for.
It seems that the technology that the aliens brought with them is keyed to their genetic make-up. To make matters worse, the only survivors of the unknown tragedy that brought them to our planet are "worker drones" or what appear to be mindless automatons. It has a very racist undertone to it, and you can easily pick out the bits that apply to us already. Reminiscent of the 40's and 50's, there are constant signs posted throughout the background of the film that specifically state that the "prawns" (derogatory name for the aliens) are not allowed to use the same public spaces as humans.
Due to the expense of caring for these visitors and the fact that they don't seem to be contributing anything at all to the betterment of mankind, a wall is built around District 9 and the aliens are required to stay inside the boundary at all times. It seems as if the wall was mostly created to pacify the irate inhabitants of Johannesburg who are upset that the millions of dollars in "emergency aid" going to the 1.5 million refugees (From Space! :-P) could be used to better their own lifestyles and that the aliens should just go home.
Okay, I can't go any further here without revealing some sensitive information, so instead of the storyline, let's focus on the movie:
Since it was produced by Peter Jackson, I expected a multi-million-dollar CGI Fest and I was not disappointed. The work done by the special-effects teams is simply amazing. It was hard for me to tell where the CGI ended and the actual real-world shots began. The effect is so seamless that you will actually find yourself watching the movie and not busy looking for "artifacts" left over from the computer-generated processes.
As I said, the movie appears to begin as a documentary. Various bits of talking heads, including personal friends and family members of the documentary's main subject as well as "experts" in the field of human-alien interaction, all seem focused on educating you, the viewer, as to the downright nastiness of the visiting species.
The documentary sections of the movie are wonderfully done. The actors continually break the fourth wall by talking to the camera man and the hidden interviewer, sometimes to comedic effects. Which brings me to my next point; I was really expecting an action movie. What I got was a very realistic and overall satisfying film that combined comedy, action, romance and perhaps one of the best heel-turned-hero movies I have ever seen.