District 9 is a film with two levels and it works very well on both of them: it is a story about aliens, with plenty of action, shootouts, and people exploding in grusome ways, but it can also be read as a film about racial segregation and injustice.
Twenty years before the action begins, a huge alien spaceship has come to a halt in the skies above Johannesburg, apparantly broken down and unable to leave. The world has had to deal with a million stranded aliens, and has done so by enclosing them all in a fenced-off slum known as District 9. A powerful corporation called MNU manages human relations with District 9 in the hope of finding out how to use the aliens' weapons technology. There are many imaginative and oddly convincing details: the use of the derogatory term 'prawn' to refer to the aliens, the attempts to classify their status and rights and the criminal trade in alien weapons that springs up all seem like believable human reactions to the situation. There is an uneasy sense of the injustices that can be commited by people who think they are only doing their best.
District 9 stars virtual unknown Sharlto Copley, who gives a great performance as MNU box ticker Wikus Van De Merwe, who becomes contaminated with a mysterious fluid that cause his body to transform bit by bit into something more and more like a prawn. He is an ordianry man, a decidedly unheroic charachter, horrified at becoming the thing he has always looked down on.
Much of the film is shot in a documentary style, with interviews with Wikus's family and collegues, although this is dropped towards the end, when the more conventional action sequences kick in. However, the best bits are the solo sequences, as Wikus, with one prawn arm and his body starting to deteriorate, wanders through District 9, dressed like a tramp and reduced to eating catfood. It is an affecting depection of how someone judged to be less than human can quickly be forced to lose his dignity and humanity.
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