Dis­trict 9

Back in the ​’90s, the naysay­ers reck­oned ​‘The Lord of the Rings’ was unfilmable. Well, how about the sto­ry of giant prawn-like aliens who arrive on Earth seek­ing asy­lum? Peter Jack­son obvi­ous­ly loves a chal­lenge, and, in his role as pro­duc­er, he’s sum­moned the might of the spe­cial effects wiz­ards at WETA to cast their spell over a rework­ing of Neill Blomkamp’s 2005 mock doc Alive in Joburg.

Through doc­u­men­tary flash­back we learn that it’s 20 years since a giant space­ship ven­tured to our plan­et with a car­go of extra-ter­res­tri­al refugees. These unan­nounced vis­i­tors have since been inte­grat­ed into South African soci­ety as an alien under­class, while their mono­lith­ic craft hov­ers mys­te­ri­ous­ly above the cap­i­tal – an omi­nous por­tent of future conflict.

With the world watch­ing, and rela­tions between species dis­in­te­grat­ing, the gov­ern­ment tasks a shad­owy multi­na­tion­al to relo­cate the aliens to their new home in ​‘Dis­trict 9’ – lit­tle more than a shiny con­cen­tra­tion camp. But their das­tard­ly inten­tions are to find a way to har­ness the awe­some pow­er of the alien’s biotech weaponry.

Enter bum­bling agent Wikus Van De Mer­we (Sharl­to Cop­ley) who gets con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with a mys­te­ri­ous sub­stance dur­ing the botched clear-out, and soon sprouts an alien claw.

On the run from his for­mer employ­ers, and des­per­ate to halt his meta­mor­pho­sis, he enters a law­less waste­land inhab­it­ed by Niger­ian gang­sters trad­ing alien armoury with riot­ing ​‘prawns’ addict­ed to tinned cat food. Dark­ly com­ic and dis­turbing­ly pos­si­ble, Trans­form­ers this ain’t…

Ear­ly teas­er trail­ers used the film’s unusu­al set­ting to bam­boo­zle audi­ences into think­ing that Dis­trict 9 was an alle­go­ry for the fail­ures of post-Apartheid South Africa, with added flash­es of digi­tised car­nage. But the ori­gins of this project pro­vide the real clue for what to expect.

After fail­ing to secure back­ing for an adap­ta­tion of leg­endary sci-fi video game Halo, Blomkamp and Jack­son have decid­ed to show the stu­dios what they missed, return­ing to the genre but this time released from the cre­ative shack­les that an estab­lished fran­chise brings.

And what a thrilling expe­ri­ence it turns out to be. Fiendish­ly plot­ted and with awe­some­ly kinet­ic (and out­ra­geous­ly bloody) action scenes, Blomkamp announces him­self in a major way, with­out let­ting the third act crescen­do lose focus in a blur of noise. For while the look of his film’s grungy tech rivals the dis­tort­ed realms of Ter­mi­na­tor: Sal­va­tion, it’s always with­in a frame­work that support’s a break­neck fight and flight story.

Dis­trict 9 joins Clover­field on the short list of new age action movies fuelled by some­thing close to auteur vision, a doc­u­men­tary sen­si­bil­i­ty and an open desire to defy genre pigeon­hol­ing. Man­ag­ing to draw seri­ous par­al­lels with the way humans have the capac­i­ty to turn against each oth­er, Blomkamp’s film offers thought pro­vok­ing thrills that have the audi­ence root­ing for CGI char­ac­ters in a way George Lucas can only dream of.

The stage might be set for a sequel, but the inevitable expec­ta­tion and big­ger bud­get (Dis­trict 9 cost just $30m) mean it will have to go some to match the impact of a com­pelling mod­ern classic.