At the Movies with Fatwayne

I got the impression that I was watching a documentary, especially during the first part of this fine film. This was necessary in order to bring us up to speed with what was happening in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2010.

Twenty eight years earlier (1982 – there, now you don’t have to do the math!) a huge alien craft approached the Earth and settled over the city of Johannesburg. The craft just hovered there for three years before the humans decided to cut into the ship to see what was up. What they discovered was a mass of sickly aliens who seemed to desperately need help.  Oddly enough, the aliens seemed to be workers who were without organization or leadership of any kind even though they were a highly advanced species.

Let us pause at this point so that I can tell you that the sight of that huge space craft just hoovering over the South African city was truly spectacular! This image will remain in my mind as one of the most successful sci-fi effects ever!

Now, being the kind hearted people that we are, we decide to offload the aliens into an area called District 9. This turns out to be little more than a dismal refugee camp with 1.8 million “prawns”  crammed together (I told you that the ship was big!). Prawns is the euphemism the humans use to refer to the aliens due to the fact that they resemble large shrimp!

Conditions are not good for our prawn friends and people’s patience is starting to run out. They decide to contract the problem to Multi National United (MNU) which is a private company with little concern for the aliens but a whole lot of concern over their advanced weaponry. The problem with these weapons is that humans can not operate them since they will only work with an entity that has the specific alien DNA.

This leads us to a very nice gentleman by the name of Wikus van der Merwe who is an employee of MNU. He is assigned to oversee the movement of the aliens to a new location (District 10). This is a huge undertaking given the sheer number of  individuals involved and the fact that relations between the species are not exactly on the friendly side.  While going about his work he is accidentally exposed to a liquid from a suspicious alien canister. Unfortunately for Wilkus, this liquid begins to affect his DNA and he starts to become more like the aliens physically, especially his left arm!

Well, you can imagine the greedy MNU bigwigs’  joy in anticipation of stumbling across a solution to the problem of operating the aliens advanced weaponry. They take Wilkus into custody and experiment on him and decide to “kill him for parts”! As you might imagine, he wants no part of this and fashions an escape. Since he is becoming more alien like in appearance, he decides to seek refuge in District 9.

As the movie progresses, he meets an alien named Christopher Johnson who lives in a shack with his son. Christopher is one of the aliens who possesses superior intelligence and was the one who created the substance in the canister which also served its main purpose of providing fuel for a crude ship that he hoped to use to reach the mother ship hoovering overhead.

That is all that I am prepared to reveal to you regarding the plot for fear of being a spoiler. At this point in the movie you can expect a whole lot of action as the mercenaries attempt to get Wilkus back and battle the fed up aliens. This action will not disappoint and lends a needed balance to a thought provoking movie.

Rated  – R -

Fatwayne’s Rating   -    -