Review: District 9

I know, I know! I'm a bit late on the District 9 wagon, it had a delayed launch in Ireland and then I had to wait for a friend to come back from his holidays to go and see it. So what did I think? Pretty damn awesome film.

20 years ago an alien ship came into the Earths atmosphere over Johannesburg where over 1 million aliens Humans nickname Prawns were trapped and dying. Today they are all packed into a concentration camp known as district 9 where they are treated like animals. The film follows a man in charge of moving the Prawns into a new habitat but manages to get himself into trouble. I don't want to ruin the film for anyone that hasn't seen it so I'll stop there.

The special effects in this movie are absolutely stunning. All the Prawns look so lifelike its unbelievable. The mothership in the sky really looks like it's there and by the end of the film it really does feel like it's meant to be there. All the sounds of the aliens and technology are top notch, the Prawn child was really awesome and I wish I could have him in a non weird way..

One thing that I was very surprised about and they do make a note of it in the film is that the ship doesn't land over Manhattan or London where all the cool stuff seems to happen in the other movies, it happens in Johannesburg which I think was a nice touch and in my mind it was a big "fuck off" to Hollywood which is always welcome.

Unfortunately that big fuck off also causes the main problem I have with the film. The main characters accent. I don't think anyone in the US would really notice this but people in Ireland and the UK definitely will. Whenever the main character says the word "fucking" his accent changes from South African to Scouse. At first I thought maybe that was just how their accent sounded but it turned out that it was only this actor who pulled it off. It was a bit distracting because he does use the word quite a bit and I couldn't stop laughing about it to myself.

The story was really compelling. A lot of people warned me that the film starts off very slowly but I completely disagree. I'm a huge Sci-fi fan, anything with aliens and I'm usually hooked which was the case here. It has sections which are meant to be documentary style interviews and videos which are pretty good to although they were sometimes a bit confusing and misleading which could have been the point or not I don't know. By the end of the movie I really wanted the Prawns to kick the shit out of the human race and with a fairly open ending which could give us a sequel, I'm still holding out for it.

The one thing that amazes me about this film is it's origin. The story goes that Peter Jackson was getting very tired of Microsoft's antics about securing a deal to get the Halo movie underway, when it all went to crap Peter Jackson decided he wanted to do a sci-fi with aliens anyway, got together with the writer and wrote District 9. The fact that it came out of the death of Halo is pretty awesome considering how great the film turned out to be. There is a line towards the end of the movie which I think is a little tribute to that fact where a Halo is mentioned but it could be a coincidence.

I definitely recommend seeing this movie, the only major thing that annoyed me was the main characters accent but other than that this film is absolutely solid and my hat goes off to Peter Jackson for proving to me that King Kong was a fluke and that he really is a good film maker.