The aliens found in South Africa’s District 9 are strange insect-like creatures that are reminiscent of the giant termite breed from Mimic. They dig through garbage and will eat just about anything. In fact, they have a particular craving for cat food. They came to a world that probably expected to meet a peaceful and diplomatic race, but instead gained a lot more homeless refugees and therefore felt resentment towards them.

District 9 begins sort of like a documentary on the History Channel. We see interviews with scholars and people who were there, intercut with archival footage from mission tapes and security cameras. A man named Wikus Van Der Merwe, an employee of an orginization called Multi-National United (MNU), has just received a major promotion and as the interviews seem to suggest, he is about to make history. MNU is moving the alien refugees from District 9 to a new prisoner camp called (drum-roll!) District 10 and Wikus has been put in charge of serving the eviction notices. He shows very little sympathy towards the creatures and cares more about furthering his career by finding stashes of alien weaponry than he does about their well-being. Within one of these hidden stashes, he finds a canister which spews out a strange black liquid, which infects Wikus and therefore starts turning him into one of the creatures, a la David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

Wikus is taken by his piers to a top secret lab where they do experiments on him. With all the powerful alien weapons the MNU has amassed, they can’t use any of it thanks to a special DNA-related safety feature. Now they have a man who is transitioning from man to alien and therefore can use the guns. Before getting cut open, Wikus escapes and is deemed a fugitive by the MNU, who has put out television spots advertising him as a sick man who has promiscuous inter-species relations with the creatures. He is forced to team up with an alien named Christopher, who can supposedly fix Mikus, but in order to do so he needs to retrieve the canister from MNU.

The effects of District 9 are often top-notch and the aliens themselves come across as very real. They are sympathetic, but not so much that they come across as too human. They simply come across as a starving society simply trying to survive. The humans characters are even less sympathetic, with Mikus really being the only human we care about, and even then he is fairly self-centered and doesn’t truly redeem himself until the final act.

The film makes for a pretty amusing, yet strange experience that is somewhat reminiscent to the style of Paul Verhoevon’s Robocop. The film is quite laughable at times, especially everytime a voodoo lunch ritual is mentioned or seen! District 9 may be worth checking out, but it may not be worth all the unconditional praise it is earning.

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