LITERAL REMAINS

Okay, I’m trying to catch up on some stuff.  I have a stack of DVD’s sitting on my desk, movies from Christmas and my birthday and thoroughly enjoyable trips to the Wal-Mart and other places.  I’m trying, trying, to get some of these things viewed.  Bare with me.

District 9 I got for my birthday, I think, way back in merry old January.  I finally popped in the player and watched it, just in time for it’s Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.  Of course, I could have told you that it didn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell of winning Best Picture.  It’s a good movie, but not Best Picture good.  Like the best of science fiction, District 9 reflects humanity at its best and worst.  It shows us our shortcomings, and offers us that glimpse into our human nature that is the essence of basic, universal, good.

An alien mothership comes to a halt over Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1982.  It hovers in the sky quietly for three months before government officials decide to bust up in that muthaship.  What they discover is an alien race stranded and malnourished, and really, really, ugly.  That is probably bad on my part to say, to judge, to call them fugly, but truth is truth, and it’s probably one of the things this movies speaks out against.  But I admit, I’m in the wrong, being judgemental and all, but, damn, the aliens are ugly.

The government sets up a camp for the alien refugees, labeled District 9, and they are separated from the rest of human society.  The camp quickly becomes a slum over the years, degenerating into a cesspool despised by the humans, and fostering crime and other unsavory elements.  Tensions between the humans and the prawns (what the humans call the aliens) mount until the government decides to build a concentration camp to relocate the prawns away from civilized society.  Multinational United (MNU) is hired as the muscle to carry out the eviction of District 9 and relocation of the aliens.

Wikus van de Merwe is put in charge of the eviction; that he is married to the bosses daughter didn’t help him get the big promotion, or so his father-in-law says.  You know he is lying after meeting Wikus.  Or is he?  There is more to Wikus than the dweeb we first see; once he is in the field, there is a dark side to Wikus that emerges.  It’s during the eviction process that Wikus becomes injured, and is sprayed with a strange liquid that leads to his gradual transformation into a prawn, and MNU begins the hunt for Wikus.  You see, the alien weapons are biologically controlled, only the aliens can fire them.  Wikus has that alien DNA now, and MNU wants to harvest him.

District 9 is a good movie.  It mixes a message with blood, guts, action, and heart, and succeeds on almost every level.  The weak part is in Wikus’ escape from MNU, it just seems a little too easy, and there are some standard buddy moments and action pieces that drag it from greatness towards the end.  And so help me, the prawns are icky.  They are gross.  Original, but damn, they are ugly.

4 out of 5
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