District 9 Review

District 9 was directed by Neill Blomkamp, produced by the great Peter Jackson, and released by TriStar pictures in 2009.
This movie was very strange. It drew me in with the fact that they didn't really explain what was going on at first. Plus, Peter Jackson playing a major role in the making of this film interested me.
As far as audience, this film can be taken many ways. If the audience is my mom, she wouldn't have much interest because of the aliens. To a sci-fi junkie this would probably quite interesting. And to someone who knows about the apartheid in South Africa would see some different perspectives as well.
The film is shown as an "after the fact" film, or recounting the memory of what happened, the interviewees somewhat explain some things but not everything. Then we come to our protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe, who has been appointed to evict all the aliens in District 9, or the "prawns." However, he goes into one house and finds a tube full of a black liquid, which shoots out a little and gets on him and in his nose. After that encounter, Van De Merwe slowly turns into one of the prawns, and of course the militant government jumps on that to use the alien guns because of his molecular structure. He escapes the laboratory and is on the run, so he goes to District 9 and runs into an alien named Christopher and his son. He then finds out that he can be fixed if they get the liquid back and fly to the Mothership and go back to the alien's planet. So they do and Van De Merwe wants to be fixed but Christopher and his son want to return to their planet to help their people first. Van De Merwe takes the typical human path and takes the ship by force to be returned to his human self, but is shot down and is forced to take on an army of gangster Africans and the MNU thugs. Finally, Van De Merwe sends Christopher off to get to the Mothership while he saves them by directing all the MNU at himself. The aliens escape and go home. Van De Merwe "disappears" and becomes a prawn himself.
The purpose of this film was to show that Xenophobia and social segregation are just awful and can corrupt governments and even people.
I saw a very Christlike sacrifice in Van De Merwe. Though at first he was selfish and only cared about himself. But in the last bit of the film, he gives up his life as a human and helps Christopher escape to the Mothership and fights off the MNU. Though the movie was strange at times, that part really spoke to me. Especially since he totally turned into a prawn.
I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but District 9 was decent.

Andrew Cortez