You are not welcome here (District 9 (DVD))

Member Name: aylawarner

Product:	District 9 (DVD)
Date:	09/10/09 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Intriguing and exciting story

Disadvantages: A little ridiculous

In 1990 a giant spaceship landed over the city of Johannesburg and millions of aliens, nicknamed 'prawns', were brought down to earth and confined to District 9, a refugee style camp in the city centre. But twenty years later the humans have had enough of the prawns who continue to break rules and commit crimes and violence. Wikus Van De Merwe is appointed to lead his team from Multi-National United (MNU) to evict the aliens into a new area away from the city. But when he is exposed to an alien fluid, Wikus's allays and perspectives trade places - he becomes a prime target of the government and a friend of the aliens.

~ Cast ~
Wikus Van De Merwe - Sharlto Copley
Tania Van De Merwe - Vanessa Haywood
Koobus Venter - David James
Fundiswa Mhlanga - Mandla Gaduka

From seeing the trailers for this film I did think it looked a bit stupid. I'm not a fan of any films with silly looking alien creatures such as Alien, and this looked set to be another one of those, but I decided to give it a go anyway as reviews for it seemed to all be positive.

Well the first 20 minutes of the film confirmed my initial thoughts. My husband and I could not stop laughing at how ridiculous it was. The aliens looked like giant green prawns, hence their nickname prawns. They talked by making clicking noises which humans could somehow understand and the way they interacted and communicated with the humans was plain stupid. Neither of us could believe that we were going to be stuck in the cinema watching 2 hours of this rubbish!

But after a while, once we'd got used to the silliness of it, the story seemed to take form and it became a lot more interesting. It was mostly filmed in a documentary style, which I'm not usually keen on as the movement of the camera usually gives me a headache, but this one worked quite well. Professionals and members of the public were shown being interviewed and it wasn't until the end of the film that we could understand what they were really talking about.

I thought Sharlto Copley did extremely well in this despite it being his very first full-length movie. He was a likeable character from the beginning with his South African accent, which sometimes sounded Irish, his quirky mannerisms and the way he acted with the aliens. His potential was then shown in full when he transformed from a simple office worker to a fugitive and fighter and someone with a lot more will-power and strength than anyone would have thought.

Immediately anyone would take the side of humans over aliens but the way the film unravelled made me instead dislike the humans and want the aliens to succeed in getting back to their own planet. The humans named the aliens 'prawns' as a derogatory term and they confined them to one area and treated them with no respect as if they are purely objects that have no feelings or emotions. One alien in particular, named Christopher Johnson, and his son, have a bigger role and you can't help ending up liking them as Christopher only wants to go home and his son is a cute little thing!

From the way the film finished, and from the popularity of this one, it looks like there is most definitely going to be a District 10. Despite my initial views and even if it was slightly ridiculous, I ended up thoroughly enjoying this and I will definitely be looking forward to seeing a sequel.

Running time: 112 minutes
Certificate rating: 15
Director: Neill Blomkamp

Summary: Documentary-style sci-fi in which aliens are forced to live in the South African slums