District 9: Neill Blomkamp's Debut Feature Film

Alien Atrocities and the Humanity of Being a Prawn.

District 9 is a rare movie capable of borrowing from the pantheon of science fiction cinema without being a hack. District 9's conceptual basis of aliens crash-landed on Earth is nothing new to the science fiction genre. Nor is District 9's premise unique with a human that befriends an extraterrestrial in the face of xenophobia and the need to violate life forms with dissection.

District 9 takes the stylistic grit of Ridley Scott's Alien, the polarizing social mockery via extraterrestrial insects of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, and the interspecies camaraderie of Nick Castle's The Last Starfighter. It also achieves a logistical imagination seen in the human reaction to the aliens, as clever as and much more real than Men in Black or even Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Rarer still is that District 9 is director/writer Neill Blomkamp's debut feature film, under the auspice of producer Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings Trilogy, King Kong). Not since George Lucas's directorial feature debut, THX-1138, has a director debuted a film with such impact.

Furthermore, District 9 debuts the unknown talents of South African actor, Sharlto Copley. In the role of Wikus van de Merwe, Copley creates one of the strongest transformative protagonists seen in the formulaic science fiction genre from decades past. Copley is joined by another South African actor, a prolific Jason Cope, who provided an on camera role, as well as the speaking voices for the CGI aliens, among other voiceovers.

District 9, which is set in Johannesburg,reaches into a heavy bag of social themes infecting South Africa like racism, xenophobia, corporate and military privatization. That Blomkamp, Copley and Cope all have ties to South Africa, among much more of the cast and crew, culminates an satirical, yet emotionally charged social commentary.