***1/2

It truly is remarkable how everyone behind District 9, director Neill Blomkamp’s new sci-fi/action opus, got everything exactly right. Let’s start with the marketing campaign - long before we’d seen the first trailer, the inconspicuously placed industrial hazard-style signs were everywhere.

Immediately evoking everything from today’s “No on 8″ billboards to the “No Coloreds” signs in the horror chapters of our history books, the signs felt like a promise of something great to come - a science fiction film ripe with allegory, fearlessly marketing itself to those who might appreciate some social commentary with their popcorn thrills (no big explosions or dazzling displays of special effects on these posters: all these said was, “This film - or whatever the hell these images are promoting - will have a brain…”). Some great early word-of-mouth and one Entertainment Weekly cover-story later, District 9 is arriving with a fierce anticipation only dreamed about by bigger-budget, bigger-studio release G.I. Joe - not bad for a little film with a director and a cast nobody’s ever heard of.

In its stunning prologue, told entirely in a stream of news reports and documentary footage, we learn that thirty years ago a spaceship entered our atmosphere and came grinding to a halt over Johannesburg, where it parked itself immobile and silent for days. A team is sent out to penetrate the ship and make contact with the inhabitants, only to find over a million aliens inside dying in squalor. With images reminiscent of the opening sequence of Scarface where refugee Cubans are herded into relocation camps in Miami, the starving aliens are given their own land in a massive fenced camp, the titular District 9.

Thirty years later, District 9 has become an all-out slum, where the aliens (now nicknamed “Prawns” because of their appearance and “bottom-feeding” dietary habits) scrounge for food and engage in black-market dealings with a gang of Nigerians who set up camp within the district. The corporation who runs the district, Multi-National United, decides to relocate the aliens to a new facility outside Johannesburg, but their intentions are less than altruistic - essentially the Haliburton of this tale, MNU manufactures weapons, and they are obsessed with learning the secret of the aliens’ incredible weaponry, which only seem to work when placed in the hands of the aliens themselves.

Enter Wikus Van de Merwe, a geeky, beyond enthusiastic MNU operative who is assigned to lead a team into District 9 and, in keeping with the law, give the inhabitants 24-hours notice of their pending relocation. The sequence is a perfect encapsulation of the kind of farce sometimes found in our legal system, akin to watching a police officer Mirandize someone who doesn’t speak the language - I’ve done my part, now they have to deal. As Wilkus, first-time actor Sharlto Copley is a revelation: unassuming beyond his initial introduction as a giddy pencil neck, Wilkus’ evolution throughout the film - both literal and figurative - is  consistently palpable thanks to Copley’s emotional and physical investment to his character. Beyond the mere artistic integrity evidenced by Blomkamp’s decision to spend his modest budget on the effects and scope of the film itself rather than big-name actors, it only helps to further present in Wilkus a true-to-life character we can truly say we’ve never seen before, and then sympathize and root for all the more when the world around him starts to go completely bat-shit.

No spoilers here, but beyond the already-fantastic back story there is an excellent and enthralling plot that emerges when we meet an alien by the name of Christopher Johnson (again, the audience elicits a bittersweet chuckle as they recognize that this creature was obviously not born with that name, and that this film’s clever references to darker parts of world history are seemingly unyielding). The film ends up being one hell of a ride, with enough exciting and cheer-inducing action and bloodshed to match its brains and sociopolitical wisdom. District 9 is a modern masterpiece, a return to the kind of science fiction film (Aliens springs immediately to mind) that is not only an exemplary and entertaining genre film, but also simply a fantastic and well-made motion picture in general.

- Logan Crow, 09-12-09