District 9 is based on Alive in Joburg, a short film directed by Neill Blomkamp, Sharlto Copley, Simon Hansen and Shanon Worley. Copley also portrayed one of the interviewed policemen. The short film is about aliens landing in South Africa and becoming confined to a specific area and forced to work.

In the movie, aliens make first contact with Earth twenty-eight years prior while humanity waited for the hostile attack or for giant advances in technology, though neither came. Instead, the aliens that arrived were refugees; the last survivors of their home world. The creatures were set up in a makeshift home in South Africa's District 9 as the world's nations argued over what to do with them. Patience over the alien situation ran out and control over them was contracted out to Multi-National United (MNU), a private company uninterested in the aliens' welfare. MNU stood to receive tremendous profits if they can make the aliens' advanced weaponry work.

MNU, thus far, have failed in making the alien weaponry work as activation of the weaponry requires alien DNA. Tension between the aliens and the humans comes to a head when an MNU field operative, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), contracts a mysterious virus that begins changing his DNA. Wikus quickly becomes the most hunted man in the world, as well as the most valuable, as he is the key to unlocking the secrets of alien technology. Merwe becomes ostracized and friendless and comes to hide in District 9.


District 9 - Official Trailer
District 9 Trailer 2

Release date(s) August 14, 2009

Alive in Joberg by Neill Blomkamp short film (6:25)

 

I was actually very excited to see this movie after the first trailer that showed in the theartres.

The first link.

After the MNU trailers that played on the TV I am kind of hating this movie.
You know the ones. The Almost viral style psa ads by MNU that warn the public about the aliens.

Those are so hokey and crappy they make me not want to see the movie at all.

 

Wasnt a bad movie.
Starts as documentary-style and then move to a third person perspective.

 

Saw it.

Gave me hope that Sci-Fi can work on the big screen again. The Halo roots of the set up and SFX were apparent if you paid attention. The same location for the Halo shorts was reused for the actual movie, and the rendering and general feel of the movie feels much the same.

I don't want to spoil the plot, but it's a refreshing look at Aliens who aren't the pinnacle of societal organization themselves.

 

Skipped out on GI Joe to see it today.
It was pretty good.

Laser jank = :awesome

 

Totally worth it and definitely one of the better movies that has come out recently.

 

Then I'm the exception. I saw it yesterday, and While I was reasonably entertained I was not really that enthralled.

On my scale of Fail and Laser Jeebus, this was a Meh. Maybe a Meh and a half...

The guy was realistic I suppose and you could see why he did what he did... but it was more going through the motions of an action movie at the end. We even got the line, "Go on with out me, I'll hold them off!"

Don't get me wrong I liked the fact that the aliens while technologicly superior were being oppressed by us, there was a good variety of creativity when it came to them. Their general flaws and addictions, there lifestyle was very well done, but as individuals while reading their subtitles there was nothing that made me care about them.

Honestly I wouldn't recommend this movie. The group I went with was split down the middle as well. It might just become a cult favorite in my books.

 

Ok, I just came back from watching this movie and here is my review for this:

Careful, this is going to contain heavy spoilers!

Well, this was certainly one of the better movies of the last months although it doesn't quite deserve all the hype its got. I know the supposed message with the comparison to Apartheid but in the end, it just made me hate humanity more then I already do, which made me understand the aliens in Independence Day and the reason they invaded earth, maybe they knew that humans were essentially racist scumbags and the universe was probably better off without them.

Every single human was a character we hated, maybe with the exception of the wife and that was a character with almost no screen time so she doesn't really count.

Ok, it is part of the message of the movie but I would have liked to see some people sticking up to the aliens. The main character doesn't really count since he is as big as a jerk as the other humans, he just happened to be the one infected with this weird alien fuel, otherwise he would have behaved the same.

Also, how does this fuel work? How is it possible that this small amount which took 20 years to gather is enough to power the mother-ship. Or alternatively was the fuel just to power the shuttle, which was either miraculously stationed underground without anyone noticing or was build by the two aliens which is even less likely? If so, why didn't they leave in the 20 years they were treated like scum?

There are just a lot of unanswered questions, with the most important perhaps the question why there are only two smart aliens. Nearly everyone else seemed to have the intelligence of Neanderthals which was coincidently the same way the humans behaved.

It just struck me as weird that there were just two aliens, the father and the son, while the rest were lethargic and primitive.

The weapons also seemed kind of foolproof, while the rifles and pistols were kind of understandable but the mac and the shuttle were rather unbelievable.

But I am nitpicking now, despite that, it was a rather enjoyable movie, not excellent but not bad either.

A rather good rating of the movie, if I were to rate it the same way we rate stories here, it would be between 2/5 and 3/5.

 

The human prostitutes let the aliens stick it to them.

 

Imagine if Prawns and humans were genetically compatible. *shudders*

 

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of this movie either. I thought pretty much the whole basis of the plot was pretty unrealistic. Why would a company be put in charge of teasing out the secrets of alien technology? That stuff would be locked up in government labs so tight no one would ever see it without signing their entire life away. And why would it only be a single company/government? Everyone who could would be trying to get their hands on that stuff. Nigerian gangsters had a bunch, you mean to tell me the US government couldn't get it? And why would that company's only line of research be "let's blend alien and human DNA so we can use their weapons". Why not take them apart and reverse engineer them so that you can learn to make them yourselves. If you need demonstrations of how they work, go get some aliens and bribe them with cat food to fire them for you while you take scientific measurements of what they do. And if you ARE set on blending alien and human DNA, why is it that when you get ahold of a guy that has the blended DNA, you do everything in your power to alienate him and make it known that you don't give a shit about him, causing him to run off when you try to dissect him with no anesthesia. And then, after he runs off, suddenly he's not important anymore, so just kill him.

And where the hell were the aliens going in their ship at the end. Didn't they say their world had been destroyed or something?

Nothing in that movie made sense to me.

 

It didn't deserve the hype. I was bored through most of it, and the characters just got on my nerves. We get it, being prejudiced against something and segregating things is bad. I can has moar walker fighting now pleaz?

 

If you want mindless action then Transformers 2 is definitely where you should look, but District 9 was always marketed as a more socially aware and thought-out film with a lot of pretty obvious allegories and satire, so it's not like they made it seem like it would be this big gigantic action-fest.

I definitely think it was solid and very original.

It's a movie about aliens. As far as I know no government in the world has a standard procedure for dealing with aliens. Saying it's 'unrealistic' is nonsense. Unless you're from the future, or something.

This was answered. The prawns have a hierarchy and the majority of those that came to Earth were the common sort of worker drones, useless unless they are given orders. With them came some of the 'royal' class, and the Queen(s), however they all died on the ship. Presumably, the main alien and his son (whose names I forgot) are part of that higher class.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't that mostly guessing on the humans side? Also it was never stated that those two were any kind of royalty, or it was lost in the German translation.

Worker class they may be, but that shouldn't mean that they are Primitive.

 

Sure, the movie may have presented a newish look at sci-fi, but there's something that annoyed me beyond all belief:

The shaky camera.

I mean, firefly was filmed hand-held, and it had a much steadier feel to it. I thought that the camera movements were overdone (especially during the calm parts, when it makes no sense to have a camera move around so much). It didn't feel natural - a cameraman should be able to hold a camera much more steadily. The zooming in and out that the editors employed also felt really cheesy.

Still, liked the movie, but probably wouldn't watch it again.

 

See in theatres or wait for DVD?

 

It should be assumed by the fact that he's the only living prawn shown that's quite intelligent. Also, you can assume the prawn corpse he stares at during the shootout in the facility to get back the fuel is probably his wife, which would make sense with his son's intelligence as well. Sure it's not technically spelled out for you, but that's one of the great things about the movie, I think. It's ambiguous and actually forces you to think for yourself about a lot of the things going on.

Uh, why not?

 

I haven't seen a movie that was as friggin awesome as this for a long time. I like most movies that come out, but I hardly ever watch them again after I've seen it once. As soon as this comes out on DVD I'm getting a copy. I really hope there is a sequel, they definitely set it up so one could happen.

Now I'm going to eat some prawns, I'm feeling peckish.

 

Honestly, I like that cinematic effect. It was filmed at first in a documentary style, and then it went to a news cameraman kind of thing. You got the feel that the dude holding it was actually there, especially when they were serving up eviction notices. As the movie progressed, it did the chase-cam thing, in normal style, and that was much less shaky. Shakiness was appropriate when it happened.

 

Just saw District 9, and it's one of the best movies of 2009. It managed to be action-packed along with thought provoking. A rare occurrence for a summer blockbuster. Appreciated the dark tone of the movie along with the moral ambiguity of the main character.