With a budget of only $30 million well-spent dollars, is it safe to say District 9 begins turning a profit on opening weekend?
For the second time this summer, a young, brand-new director has emerged from out of nowhere to present a vision of where sci-fi can go from here. It first happened with Moon, the elegant and tightly sealed thinkpiece from Duncan Jones that operated far more with the head than with the heart. Now, from the complete opposite side, comes District 9, Neill Blomkamp’s visceral and thumping debut that, even if it doesn’t have quite all its ideas in order, presents a fascinating and effective vision of the future, and of humanity itself.
Shot and set in Blomkamp’s native South Africa, “District 9” imagines a present-day scenario in which humans and aliens are forced into an uneasy co-existence and, predictably, bring out the violent worst in each other. As scripted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, the result reps a remarkably cohesive hybrid of creature feature and satirical mockumentary that elaborates on the helmer’s 2005 short “Alive in Jo’burg,” borrows plot points from 1988’s “Alien Nation” and takes its emotional cues from “E.T.”
Combining the very best of the postwar sci-fi movies with their trenchant political undertones and pulse-pounding dynamism and contemporary movie technology that can blend aliens seamlessly into a realistic human world of urban and moral decay, “District 9” flirts with greatness.
This science fiction film from South African-born Canadian Neill Blomkamp, a protege of Peter Jackson, who produced the film, stumbles in a few crucial areas but even so it’s a helluva movie. No true fan of science fiction — or, for that matter, cinema — can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.
‚ÄúDistrict 9,‚Äù an innovative and exciting sci-fi-thriller, set against the apartheid struggle in South Africa, announces the arrival an extremely gifted filmmaker, Neill Blomkamp… Inventvely combining the thematic conventions of various genres and the stratgeic approaches of documentary, fiction, and even mockumentary, ‚ÄúDistrict 9‚Äù is an original work about political refugees that works on a number of levels, the particular and historical, as well as the more metaphoric or allegorical.
…”District 9,” easily one of the best features of this long, boring summer, could become a sleeper, appealing to younger and older demographics due to the effective blend of a thrilling sci-fi with strong political overtones.
