Prawns Anyone? Yes, please...
Every once in a while I happen to watch a movie I would love to write myself, a movie whose magic goes on beyond the end titles, catching my mind, putting a spell on my imagination. Every once in a while I feel like as if the story I have been told about in the last couple of hours was damn real and the life of its main characters could in fact go on, as does the life of everyone else. This is the case of District 9, surely one of the most surprising and involving movies of the last few years, superb science-fiction, although the movie is not (only) science-fiction, the category being a clear oversimplification –as it always is.
In fact, the story line has the strength and credibility of a journalistic reportage, whose visual and narrative language is brilliantly mixed, throughout the whole movie, to the subjective experience of the main characters. As a result, I literally got hooked up, first drawn into the documentary-like scenes of the daily life of a urban ghetto – the District 9, right – populated by an Alien nation arrived in the sky of Johannesburg 20 years earlier; then, I found myself launched at the highest speed, following the desperate attempt of the main character (Sharlto Copley, aka, Wikus Van De Merwe) to restore his humanity, as moral as much as physical. In addition to a particularly involving plot, the visual effects are dazzling and perfectly consistent. The alien creatures, nicknamed prawns because of their appearance, look absolutely real – and kind of gross, actually – as well as the shootings of the spaceships, as if, instead of sitting down inside a theatre, you were watching an ordinary report of the daily news on TV.
Overall, the movie, directed by the talented Neil Blomkamp, changes the way we would expect the “encounter of the third type” should be. Yet, once again, the meeting-interaction between humans and aliens is presented as another chance to think over issues like diversity, in-tolerance and greed. And once again, the answers we find are unpleasant, much more than the look of the prawns, poor lads unfortunately stuck in the wrong planet.
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Great insight into District 9, and how it's worth transcends the mere runtime of the film. I've got to get myself out to the theatre more; I usually dislike reading reviews before watching a film. How else can i agree or disagree?
I'm also digging the new template and layout of The Unreliable Move Guy. Nice work!