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The great flaw in science fiction films where aliens land on Earth is the built-in assumption that, just because they can zoom city-sized spaceships across the universe, their societies are equally advanced.
ETs tend either to have evolved beyond violence or to have perfected it so hard they can kill you in their sleep, which they don't even need because drinking your blood is so nourishing. They don't really have economies, either: everyone just does their job with no apparent need for payment beyond the telepathic high-fives they're no doubt sending each other nonstop for being so good at operating gunnery seats or serving up intergalactic sloppy joes or any of the hundreds of other professions you'd need in a ship that size.
That's why the aliens in District 9 are so refreshing. They're not a brilliant, well-oiled cultural machine, they're a throng of catfood-gobbling low-lives who probably flunked Starfleet Academy and had to settle for an AA from the Proxima Centauri College of Welding and Deep Frying. They're so incompetent they don't even seem to care they can't get their ship back off the ground. You know these dudes are down for a beer whenever you ring them up.
Twenty years ago, a ship housing a million aliens became stranded over South Africa. With no way to get home, they were eventually gathered up into one big refugee camp outside Johannesburg, where they live in wretched poverty.
The resulting crime and inter-species tension forces the government to relocate them far from the city. Bureaucrat Sharlto Copley is sent in to help with the eviction process, but while he's in the alien slums of District 9, he's infected with a substance that begins to turn him into one of them. With his company looking to dissect him and reap the profits of his hybrid biology, Copley turns fugitive, fleeing to the hostile territory of the alien city.
Not really what I was expecting, given the action-heavy trailer. Rather than being an epic tale of two species learning to settle their differences with fighter jets and zappy cannons, District 9 sticks close to Copley's personal tragedy, a grotesque, small-scale affair that has him torching alien eggs one moment and becoming one of them the next.
Newish writer/director Neill Blomkamp follows that transformation with the skill of a grizzled veteran. There's a lot of exposition to unpack, but even in the early going, when things play out like a history documentary but worse because it's not even true and it's set in one of those parts of the world you don't really like to think about, it cruises along with a confident momentum that lets you know you're headed someplace interesting.
Like with its world-building. Taking the aliens as a historical fact rather than being all "Hey, here's these crazy bug-monsters from beyond the stars," District 9 is heavy on the practical matters of the gangs and crime and casual inhumanity that arise when whole populations are left without money or means. Given South Africa's less-then-impressive racial history, it all carries a weird weight, and pays off big once those details tie together in the action-heavy third act.
Meanwhile, it looks about as good as a movie can look. With CG and design work from Weta Workshop (producer Peter Jackson's squad of special effects-ninjas), the squalor of the sets and the grandeur of the mothership practically breathe.
The setting and story feel so fresh it's something of a letdown when the finale veers into "No way man, I won't leave you behind" territory that could be straight out of a Lethal Weapon sequel, except with a talking lobster-man instead of Danny Glover.
It rights itself as soon as it returns to Copley's physical deterioration, a disgusting, Cronenberg-like process that somehow evokes sympathy for a character who started the movie as an insecure, casually vicious government stooge. The knockout punch in what's as much a drama as it is a laser-powered action flick, District 9 is one of the most unexpectedly great sci-fi films in recent years.
Grade: A-
