(2009) Director Neill Blomkamp's gritty, violent sci-fi thriller, co-written with Terri Tatchell and adapted from his short 2001 film Alive in Joburg, produced by Peter Jackson, with impressive CGI and FX animation, is allegorical of South Africa's era of apartheid.

Presented as if a documentary of events covering more than 20 years, beginning in the early 1980s with a massively dull, industrial-looking, alien mothership hovering over Johannesburg, with news clips and interviews, after the extraterrestrials are discovered to be malnourished and dying on their (inexplicably) inoperable spacecraft, they are ferried to Earth and housed in shanties in what is called District 9.

However, relations between humans and the aliens, whose appearance of a cross between a sea creature and junkyard parts results in the epithet "pawns" applied to them, quickly deteriorates. Restricted to their district the leaderless aliens, perceived by the public through the media as stupid yet violent, along with having an ugly exterior, behave abominably in the eyes of humans, consuming raw meat, devouring cans of cat food, having interspecies sex with Nigerian prostitutes.

Multi-National United (MNU), a private company contracted to manage the refugees, has a keen interest in exploiting the aliens for their technology and advanced weaponry. CEO Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar) promotes his midlevel bureaucrat son-in-law Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who initially appears to be a laughable caricature, to take charge of evicting and transferring the 1.8 million prawns to District 10, a new location, far north of the capital, in what is more like a concentration camp with a bio lab for genetic experimentations. The aim is to learn how to use the aliens' powerful laser weapons, which humans cannot operate.

Early on an organization of Nigerian gangsters, headed by the ruthless Obesandjo, traded the starving aliens cat food and sex for their weapons; but after discovering they could not shoot the guns, the Nigerians began killing and eating aliens in the belief this would give them the desired ability.

Accompanied by paramilitary personnel but wanting to avoid physically harming the aliens if possible (though he joyfully destroys an illegal reproductive facility), Wikus with clipboard in hand, personally confronts aliens in their shacks with eviction notices. In the abode of Christopher Johnson (the aliens have been given human names and understand English but speak a guttural foreign language; and Johnson, who has a young son, is exceptionally intelligent), after Johnson's comrade is killed for being aggressively uncooperative, Wikus, his left hand injured in the fracas, discovers a cylinder of black fluid, to which he's accidentally exposed when the canister under pressure sprays his face.

From Wikus's wounded arm an alienlike claw erupts. Following medical tests, MNU officials realize that Wikus now possesses through a mingling of his DNA with that of the prawns the means of discharging the laser guns, but Wikus abhors violence. Instead of relying on an obstinate individual, a decision is made, with Smit's approval, to harvest all of Wikus's tissue before he becomes completely transformed into a prawn.

Escaping from the operating table in the bio lab - the media reports that he's dangerous, having been infected by an alien virus after engaging in interspecies sex - Wikus makes his way to District 9 where he fortuitously finds in the dwelling where he'd discovered the canister Christopher, who explains that the fluid in the cylinder (now in the hands of MNU), painstakingly collected for two decades from debris that fell to Earth from the mothership, is the fuel needed for the return home; Christopher also assures Wikus that he can reverse the DNA process taking place within the human's cells. The pair, being pursued by MNU's paramilitary forces, embark on a suicidal mission to save themselves and rescue the stranded aliens from their bleak fate.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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