District 9

I watched District 9 this afternoon, and even though I'm not usually a big fan of sci-fi shoot-em-up thrillers, I quite enjoyed this one. It came with good credentials with Lord of the Rings producer Peter Jackson at the helm. The premise is that an alien spaceship comes to Earth and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. Why any self-respecting aliens would choose Johannesburg isn't explained, but it doesn't really matter. The spaceship just sits there without any aliens making it to earth. When humans finally enter the spaceship, they find tens of thousands of starving and sickly creatures, and create a refugee camp called District 9 for them near the slums of JBurg. Twenty years later the aliens, dubbed prawns because of their shrimp-like appearance, are becoming restive, and the humans nearby are also getting fed up with with these ugly and repulsive creatures living nearby. The action starts with a plan to move the prawns to District 10, a couple of hundred miles from any major population centers. The main protagonist is a low-level bureaucrat tasked with moving the prawns to their new home. It's quite something watch his transformation from a not very nice, bumbling civil servant, into a true hero.

The movie is done in a combination of cinema verite, newscasts, surveillance video cameras, interviews with journalists, and more conventional shooting styles. There are also the usual cool, but now pretty ordinary, special effects. The film works well as a fast-paced action thriller, but if you look a little deeper there are all sorts of undertones of the evils of the military-industrial complex, race relations, and redemption.

I quite enjoyed it, and would highly recommend it.

And while I'm on the subject of movies, check out Roger Ebert's best films of the decade. Roger Ebert has been reviewing movies forever at Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times and more. He's still reviewing movies even though he's suffering complications from thyroid cancer and can no longer eat normally. For a moving first person account of his troubles, click here. His list of movies contains some famous ones, and some I've never heard of, but one stuck out. Silent Light, that Mexican-Mennonite movie I've previously written about made the list! Maybe Ebert's got some Mennonite blood in him, or maybe all the medications and lack of food had something to do with it.