celluloid geekazoid generously gave me his extra ticket to an advance screening of district 9 tonight. "district 9" takes place twenty years after large space ship appears and hovers over johannesburg. inside the ship were a bunch of starving aliens. they are taken to the surface as a humanitarian gesture, put in a refugee camp and fed. after the aliens clash with humans, a wall is built around the camp and by the beginning of our story, the camp had developed into a crime-infested slum. a slum that is effectively under military occupation by the MNU, a multinational corporation formed to deal with the aliens.
from this premise an action film follows. i'm not really a fan of most action films, and it had some of those annoying action film clichés, like the one where someone has a gun to his head and is about to be shot, when just at the last second the would-be shooter is shot. that happens four or five times in this film.
but if you can get beyond that, and beyond the fair amount of exploding bodies gore, the film does have a remarkably original premise. a premise charged with political implications and yet the film never resorts to speechifying. the political issues are open and obvious, but people rarely talk about them overtly. just like in real life. with nods to other sci-fi films like "V", "independence day" and "the fly" (and some non-sci-fi non-films like "the office"), "district 9" still came across as original, breaking with science fiction conventions as often as not, and sometimes flipping them on their head. i think it's worth seeing.
(one very minor criticism that probably only i noticed: why would a nigerian living in south africa use the word muzungu?)
UPDATE: cg's write up of the film is here.
