IRREVERENT Magazine - Movie Reviews

Apparently some of you are curious about what would happen if a bunch of weird aliens came to earth and got thrown into a ghetto in South Africa, huh? What, longing for apartheid already?

Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a guy with a great new job. He works for a really big company, just married the boss' daughter, and thus got handed a great new promotion evicting a bunch of icky alien guys from their disease ridden hovels. Yup, things are looking bright.

So he mounts up, grabs 40,000 nearby troops with heavy armaments, and drives off into the slums where the icky aliens live. He knocks on doors, he talks to the icky aliens (yes, we've learned how to talk to them over the years), he laughs and jokes with his thugs, and murders a few unborn alien fetuses. Things are going well.

Then he stops in one particularly suspicious looking hovel, and before long manages to squirt some alien gunk all on his face. Shortly after he begins turning into an icky alien himself.

Luckily for him, his father-in-law is the boss, so he knows exactly what to do: exploit his son-in-law immediately for the good of the shareholders. Wikus (Copley) doesn't agree, breaks loose, and goes on a rampage with some other icky aliens to get back the gunk (they confiscated it), repair their inoperable flying saucer, and get the hell out of dodge.

Everything goes to hell, and Wikus ends up as a full-blown icky alien sitting around the ghetto himself fashioning trickets out of junk. One of the weirdest, and certainly longest extended metaphors for the evils of apartheid I've ever seen, District 9 is ok watching if you're bored, but keep the remote handy.