This from Variety:

Posted: Fri., Jul. 24, 2009, 7:30pm PT
Peter Jackson stirs up Hall H
Producer tubthumps 'District 9'
By KRISTINA RETTIG

Pity director Scott Stewart. Though his "Legion" shared the bill with "District 9" for Sony Pictures' Friday Comic-Con panel, everyone standing in line for Hall H came for only one reason: "District 9" producer Peter Jackson. That said, if the footage impresses for the lesser-known "Legion," it could prove to be a brilliant strategy on Sony's part.

First up was Stewart, who, after taking a few snapshots of the audience with his iPhone, started the clip. The story of a band of strangers in a post-apocalyptic world, one of whom is a diner waitress pregnant with the new messiah, "Legion" appeared to be exciting and visually compelling, juxtaposing hyper-violence and religious imagery to slightly campy effect - at Comic-Con, a very good thing.

The panel itself included Adrianne Palicki, Doug Jones, Tyrese Gibson and Paul Bettany. Aside from exchanging pleasantries about the joys of making their "angels with machine guns" film, the discussion focused on the film's religious subject matter. Stewart said that "Legion" was "not a religious movie," describing it as more of a cross between "Terminator" and "The Exorcist."

However, when the "Legion" panel concluded, you could almost hear the collective increase in heart rates. When Jackson finally took the stage, he was greeted with an energetic and extended standing ovation. Knowing his audience exceedingly well, he opened with some tidbits about "The Hobbit" to head off non-"District 9" questions during the Q&A.

Then, after showing about seven minutes of footage from "District 9," Jackson passed the baton to new director Neill Blomkamp and star Sharlto Copley. Jackson explained that the creation of "District 9" had been an "unusual experience" because of Blomkamp's decision to do the film in a highly improvised manner without adherence to a formal script.

"I wanted the sci-fi to feel as real and grounded as possible," Blomkamp said. Both Blomkamp and Copley also drew upon their South African roots in relating to the film's overarching theme of oppression.

During the panel, Jackson continued to represent himself as the film's mentor and advisor, chiming in only every so often so that Blomkamp and Copley could make their impressions on the fans.

Jackson also professed his desire to make more low-budget fare like the horror films of his early career. He claimed that bigger budgets made filmmakers too "safe," afraid to take chances.

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This from The Hollywood Reporter:

'District 9' buzz positively non-human
By Steven Zeitchik

Comic-Con seems to have its first unexpected breakout, as "District 9," the film formerly known as the weird bus-stop ad movie, is riding a wave of strong buzz.

The pic's Friday afternoon panel got crowds going more than a low-budget alien-vs-human action movie ever has a right to do, or at least any low-budget alien-vs-human movie without Peter Jackson's name attached as a producer has a right to do.

Jackson worked the room with a low-key, effortless ease - no McG-style bombast or Downey Jr.-type charisma, just a very basic approach to explaining the movie's history.

The project grew out of the ashes surrounding the "Halo" movie (which has pretty much zero lives left, incidentally; Jackson said the film rights have even reverted to Microsoft). When director Neill Blomkamp couldn't direct the vidgame adaptation after that project collapsed, Jackson & Co. came up with a high-conept pic Blomkamp could shoot instead.

"We woke up in the morning thinking we were making 'Halo' and we went to bed at night making 'District 9,'" Jackson said.

(The director also masterfully played the outsider card. "Geek power," Jackson pumped the crowd in a rare moment of cheerleading "I wish you could take all this energy and bottle it and give it to Hollywood execs to drink" -- even though all the people in the room were being marketed to heavily by just those Hollywood execs.)

Anyway, the twist with '9' was to shoot it without a proper script -- and without the studio budget that would bog things down in development or production. "With (bigger budgets) you have that responsibility and you have that anxiety and you play it a little safer," Jackson said. "The thing about 'District 9' is it's a $30 million movie. So it's low enough to give (us) freedom. It was never made to go outside the fan demographic."

The gathered didn't seem bothered much by the budget; they just got rapturous about the prospect of something Jacksonian coming out so soon (Sony released the pic August 14). And then the footage took care of the rest.

Seven minutes from the pic -- which uses a partly mockumentary style to tell the story of aliens and humans battling in modern South Africa (apartheid subtext optional) -- gave away a little too much. Instead of just knowing that the creatures fight, you understand a lot about the main character, how he became the way he is, what his own conflict is, and which side he ends up on.

Then again, there's really no other way to do it -- part of the way you sell a movie with no pre-packaged awareness and with a comparativley complicated hook is to lay out the arc of the story.

The raucuous reception followed a screening Thursday night attended by Jackson, which already had the convention center talking.

If the Comic-Con hype translates, "D9" will follow in the more classic model of pre-release marketing, taking the good vibes at a festival or convention and turning right around and converting it into box office. The look-for-it-next-summer stuff only gets you so far.

Jackson also tossed fans an update on "The Hobbit," which he is developing with Guillermo del Toro for the latter to direct -- but it wasn't exactly an announcement packed with news. Jackson said the first draft of the script should be in to Warners in several weeks, but without a greenlight or casting they were still a long way from the go squares.

In the meantime, the director said, he's thinking about other genres. "Maybe I should find a low-budget horror movie," Jackson said. If things continue in this direction, we wonder if that project might just be "District 10."

An impressive positive Review from Variety:

District 9
(New Zealand)
By JUSTIN CHANG

A Sony Pictures Entertainment (in North America) release of a Peter Jackson presentation in association with TriStar Pictures and Block/Hanson of a WingNut Films (New Zealand) production. (International sales: QED Intl., Los Angeles.) Produced by Jackson, Carolynne Cunningham. Executive producers, Bill Block, Ken Kamins. Co-producer, Philippa Boyens. Co-executive producers, Paul Hanson, Elliot Ferwerda. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Screenplay, Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell.

With: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, David James, Vanessa Haywood, Mandla Gaduka, Kenneth Nkosi, Eugene Khumbanyiwa, Louis Minnaar, William Allen Young.

Upon the ashes of his aborted "Halo" vidgame adaptation, producer Peter Jackson has erected "District 9," an enjoyably disgusting sci-fier set in and around a rubble-strewn war zone where extraterrestrial refugees have taken up indefinite residence. Better conceived and executed than one might expect from a low-budget rebound project, this grossly engrossing speculative fiction bears Jackson's blood-splattered fingerprints but also heralds first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp as a nimble talent to watch. A viral campaign reminiscent of the more gimmicky "Cloverfield" should draw hefty hordes initially, but positive notices and buzz will be required to sustain a B.O. invasion.

Shot and set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, "District 9" imagines a present-day scenario in which humans and aliens are forced into an uneasy co-existence and, predictably, bring out the violent worst in each other. As scripted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, the result reps a remarkably cohesive hybrid of creature feature and satirical mockumentary that elaborates on the helmer's 2005 short "Alive in Jo'burg," borrows plot points from 1988's "Alien Nation" and takes its emotional cues from "E.T."

The film's faux-verite visual style, however, is very much a thing of the present, blending handheld HD camerawork with ersatz news coverage (complete with CNN-style text scrolls) and talking heads, plus actual archival footage from local news agencies, so as to suggest an urgent dispatch from the front lines of an interspecies war.

The introductory 15 minutes are swiftly paced, making modest demands on the viewer to keep up with the jiggly aesthetic and the particulars of the premise: Twenty years ago, an enormous spaceship came to rest over Johannesburg, now a sun-scorched urban wasteland. Since then, the ship's inhabitants, referred to as "prawns" -- four-legged insectoid beings that walk upright, secrete black goo and speak in subtitled grunts and gurgles -- have been moved into the titular ghetto and placed under the control of Multi-National United, a private corporation bent on cracking the secrets of the aliens' ultra-powerful weapons.

Into the fray strides Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), an annoyingly chipper, boastful MNU operative overseeing the transfer of aliens to the more remote District 10. Blithely navigating cameramen through the creatures' filthy shack homes, Wikus accidentally comes into contact with an icky substance that, within hours, begins altering his DNA.

In the script's most ingenious gambit, the contaminated Wikus is suddenly coveted by MNU, as well as by a gang of Nigerian thugs and witch doctors who won't win the filmmakers any prizes for ethnic sensitivity. Forced into hiding, Wikus teams up with an intelligent, green-skinned prawn, Christopher Johnson (voiced by Jason Cope), and his kid, Little CJ, who's kinda cute in a hideous sort of way; together, they seek a way to reverse Wikus' alien metamorphosis and help the refugees return to their planet.

Rather than plunge the viewer immediately into unrelieved carnage and chaos, the film opens on a note of anxious uncertainty and tense humor as it probes the varying degrees of hostility in human-prawn relations. Though compelling throughout, "District 9" never becomes outright terrifying, largely because Blomkamp is less interested in exploiting his aliens for cheap scares than in holding up a mirror to our own bloodthirsty, xenophobic species.

That said, he doesn't skimp on the viscera; it's hard to watch the grisly climactic battle, with its parade of high-tech weaponry and exploding body parts, and not think of the horror cheapies Jackson was making pre-"Lord of the Rings." The pic does take a sentimental turn toward the end, with an excess of alien reaction shots that feel at odds with the much more authentic passion Blomkamp lovingly invests in his grotesque setpieces.

Copley makes the most of the only substantial human role -- and not an especially likable one at that -- with a twitchy, blustery, shifty-eyed performance of ferretlike intensity. Dropping F-bombs in Afrikaans-accented English, he ably conveys not only Wikus' physical transformation but also his mental deterioration and subsequent moral awakening; it's to the pic's credit that when Wikus is shown on the battlefield, his half-mutated body covered with festering wounds and alien protrusions, he has never seemed more profoundly human.

Lensed primarily on the Red-One camera, the film looks and sounds terrific, its seeming improvisation masking the obviously exhaustive planning required in all departments. The interactions between the aliens (a combo of f/x and old-fashioned prosthetics) and the humans are handled as confidently as anything in the "Transformers" movies and are arguably more impressive for d.p. Trent Opaloch's off-the-cuff shooting style. Clinton Shorter's percussive score is effective but at times over-reliant on the loud wailing/crooning that has become a too-easy signifier of Africa and other foreign locales.

A positive review from The Hollywood Reporter:

Film Reviews
District 9 -- Film Review
By Kirk Honeycutt, July 28, 2009 10:00 ET

"District 9"

Bottom Line: A genuinely original science fiction film that grabs you immediately, not letting go until the final shot.

Combining the very best of the postwar sci-fi movies with their trenchant political undertones and pulse-pounding dynamism and contemporary movie technology that can blend aliens seamlessly into a realistic human world of urban and moral decay, "District 9" flirts with greatness. This science fiction film from South African-born Canadian Neill Blomkamp, a protege of Peter Jackson, who produced the film, stumbles in a few crucial areas but even so it's a helluva movie. No true fan of science fiction -- or, for that matter, cinema -- can help but thrill to the action, high stakes and suspense built around a very original chase movie.

Having scored a direct hit with audiences last week at Comic-Con, "District 9" is primed for solid business in all markets when it rolls out domestically in August and globally from August through October.

By choosing to film in the city of his youth, Johannesburg, Blomkamp situates his story in a very real place off the beaten path for science fiction. The accents, townships, barbed-wire enclosures and harsh, dusty environment all give "District 9" a gritty sense of place. Why shouldn't an alien spaceship land some place other than the U.S.?

In fact, the film's alien ship arrived over the sky of Jo'burg 20 years before the movie begins. Instead of Spielberg aliens, these are exhausted refugees whose ship literally ran out of gas. The stalled mother ship still hovers over the cityscape, its bedraggled occupants long ago removed from its foul compartments into makeshift camps separated from the human population.

These creatures are deliberately made to appear disgusting: Located somewhere between insects and crustaceans on the evolutionary scale, the aliens have hard shell areas, extremely thin waists, sinewy joints and surprising strength. Humans, in their disgust, call them "prawns" because they are bottom-feeding scavengers who root around for food, especially cat food!

(Make what you will of a humanoid species segregated into refugee camps in South Africa, a place still coping with the after-effects of the apartheid system. The film makes no comment, nor does it need to.)

What the aliens apparently lack is a dark liquid that powers not only their ship but sophisticated weaponry. The humans would love to control those weapons, but activation requires alien DNA. That doesn't prevent a Nigerian underworld boss, Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbanyiwa), from buying up the illegal alien weapons with cat food.

Multinational United (MNU), a private company contracted to control the growing alien population, decides to relocate them from their homes in District 9 to a rural concentration camp. Through nepotism, the task of this mass removal is handed to MNU field operative Wikus (Sharlto Copley), a by-the-book wimp in a vast bureaucracy.

While delivering eviction notices, he discovers and tries to clear an illegal lab run by alien Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope). (You've got to like the idea that condescending Earthlings have given human names to this subjugated species.) In doing so, Wikus unwittingly gets infected with the alien virus that rapidly changes his DNA. Within hours, he becomes violently ill and grows an alien claw for a hand.

You guessed it. His claw can now operate alien weaponry. Instantly, he is "the most valuable business artifact on Earth." Somehow this means MNU scientists want to harvest his organs. Wilkus escapes, and the chase is on. Hot on his heels is MNU's chief enforcer and the movie's chief villain, Koobus (David James).

The fugitive hides in the only place no one will look: District 9. There he is forced into an uneasy alliance with Christopher and his young son. Seems that virus he came in contact with is the liquid Johnson has been distilling for the past two decades to power the mother ship back home.

The story, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, comes at you via different media components: Some is raw black-and-white surveillance footage; an MNU corporate video delivers interviews with staffers and other participants, including Wikus; real footage from news agencies provides crowd scenes; finally, cinematographer Trent Opaloch's use of everything from handheld to mini-cameras to shoot much of the action as if it were happening beyond his control, a thing caught on the run.

What the film runs away from though is well-rounded characters. Wikus stands alone as the only fully developed character, a human who has little choice but to become a traitor to his own species. Everyone else leaves a fleeting impression, and the film's villains are too cartoonish. When the decision is made to harvest Wikus' organs -- by his own father-in-law, no less -- there isn't even a hint of a moral dilemma.

Then too the whole point of the chase is vaguely defined. The Nigerian gangster wants to cut off Wikus' arm to eat it! The MNU scientists want to kill Wikus. This makes little sense: Shouldn't Wikus -- the only being who can operate alien weapons -- be of greater value alive than dead? What do the scientists believe they can extract from his organs?

Maybe no one thinks straight in the blur of events. Most of the action takes place over 74 hours. Blomkamp catches its frantic activity with all the raw authenticity of a documentary, egged on by the rhythmic drive of Clinton Shorter's magnificent score.

"District 9" is smart, savvy filmmaking of the highest order.

I'm expecting this thread to explode with posts very soon. It's piqued my interest, and I think it's going to be another out-of-nowhere summer hit.

The trailers look great, FX as good as Transformers but for adults and mercifully no LaBeouf and Fox in sight.

I have to admit, this film looks entertaining as heck. . .

When I found out that this film was a "documentary" about alien segregation, I was sold. Even though his name on the credits doesn't matter to me, the fact that Peter Jackson is involved does give me a lot of hope.

It looks interesting, I must say. The premise is kind of cool. The latest trailer to come out is pretty good. We'll see. Maybe I will go see it.

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I have never been so anxious to see a movie in a while and I really have no idea why.

This looks utterly entertaining, and perhaps even intriguing.

We'll see.

I'm absolutely stoked for the release of this film. I hope it does well in the box office. It's been a rather lackluster summer for films. I guess after the euphora of last year's The Dark Knight, I'm waiting for the next huge event movie to come. I certainly think that District 9 has that potential.

A very positive review from THE VILLAGE VOICE...

Aliens as Apartheid Metaphor in District 9
By Scott Foundas
Tuesday, August 11th 2009 at 2:04pm

The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill Blomkamp's fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mothership and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the space invaders of most science fiction, these six-foot-tall E.T.s (pejoratively nicknamed "prawns," but more closely resembling the love child of a ****roach and the Creature From the Black Lagoon) come neither in peace nor in malice. They are, we are told, the worker bees of whatever galaxy they hail from, accustomed to following orders rather than giving them. And so they find themselves dazed and confused in their new home, while their flying saucer still hovers inertly over the skyline, as if waiting for a jump-start from an intergalactic AAA.

A high-end commercials director making his feature debut, Blomkamp (who also co-wrote the script with Terri Tatchell) milks his ostensibly fantastic scenario for all its allegorical worth. With its corrugated tin sheds and abject poverty, District 9 stands in for the township settlements where more than a million South African blacks still live without basic human services, two decades after the end of apartheid. But you don't have to squint too hard to also see the itinerant community as an all-purpose analog for the ghettos of Nazi Germany, America's inner cities, and all of those other places where unwanted, powerless peoples have been herded off far from the backyards of the ruling class. Blomkamp's touch, however, is anything but heavy, and for most of its run time, District 9 whizzes by with a resourcefulness and mordant wit nearly worthy of its obvious influences: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dawn of the Dead, and Starship Troopers.

As the movie begins, a wave of violent prawn unrest—not unlike the one that rocked South Africa's real townships only last month—has prompted the good people of Jo'burg to crave even greater distance from their sub-human neighbors, and a forced relocation of all alien residents to a Guantánamo-style tent city known as District 10 has become law. Enter Multi-National United, a smarmy private military contractor that places the relocation in the hands of one Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a not very bright corporate lackey who also happens to be married to the boss's daughter. While MNU tries to decipher the aliens' advanced weapons technology (leading to one disturbing scene set in a research lab that Dr. Mengele would have loved), affable but clueless Wikus yearns to surmount claims of nepotism. Then everything goes haywire, with the oppressor getting a crash course in what it feels like to be the oppressed.

District 9 is never better than in its first 45 minutes, as Blomkamp maps out the film's social and economic realities via a grab bag of news reports, corporate videos, and CCTV cameras. The aliens, we learn, can understand English, but speak in their own indigenous language of guttural grunts and clicks (making this one of two major releases this month, along with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, to predominantly feature subtitled dialogue). Meanwhile, inside the boundaries of District 9 itself, a cadre of Nigerian gangsters exploit the prawns by charging them exorbitant prices for black-market goods (including the canned cat food the aliens regard as a culinary delicacy). Eventually, Blomkamp adds some straight dramatic scenes to the mix, around the point that the movie itself evolves into a somewhat more straightforward pursuit thriller—albeit one in which Wikus is both Dr. Richard Kimble and the one-armed man. Taking refuge in the very community he is supposed to be uprooting, the middle manager finds himself forming a tentative alliance with a science-geek prawn known by the anglicized name of Christopher Johnson (played by actor Jason Cope, with the aid of a few CGI enhancements), who may be his people's only hope for a better life and who turns out to be the most humane, compassionate character in the District 9 landscape.

Even in the movie's most conventional stretches, Blomkamp puts things across with terrific verve, using action and computer effects to enhance rather than trump story and character. District 9 was produced, with help from The Lord of the Rings honcho Peter Jackson, for all of $30 million (about the average advertising budget on a standard Hollywood production) after plans for Jackson and Blomkamp to collaborate on a much larger-scale adaptation of the Halo video-game franchise fell apart, and the entire project seems carried along by the scrappy energy of a bright, young filmmaker working far away from Hollywood's prying, homogenizing eyes. Probably only with an advocate like Jackson to run interference for him could Blomkamp have gotten away with a lot of it—the Johannesburg setting (aren't alien invasions only supposed to happen in New York, L.A., or D.C.?), the dweeby hero, the thick South African accents, the subtitles. I can't wait to see what Blomkamp does next, and I very much hope he gets even less money to do it.

This movie cant get here soon enough for me!

A ***1/2 out of **** review from Christy Lemire in the ASSOCIATED PRESS...

The mysterious and alarming signs have been out there for weeks, months even: On billboards, benches and bus stops featuring crude cartoon alien drawings, they've warned us of non-humans, they've urged us to remain separate.

"What is all that about?" you've probably wondered. Well, they're ads for the enormously buzzed-about "District 9," and thankfully, given their ubiquity, all the hype is justified.

This is one intense, intelligent, well-crafted action movie — one that dazzles the eye with seamless special effects but also makes you think without preaching. Like the excellent "Moon" from earlier this summer, "District 9" has the aesthetic trappings of science fiction but it's really more of a character drama, an examination of how a man responds when he's forced to confront his identity during extraordinary circumstances.

Aliens who arrived here in their spaceship more than 20 years ago have now been quarantined in cramped and dangerous slums; the nerdy bureaucrat charged with moving them to new quarters (the tremendous Sharlto Copley) undergoes a physical and emotional transformation in the process.

What's amazing is that this visceral yet philosophically sophisticated film is the first feature from commercial and music-video director Neill Blomkamp, who co-wrote the script with Terri Tatchell. (Peter Jackson is the big name attached to this refreshingly star-free project — he's one of the producers — and Weta Digital, the company behind Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, provided the intricate alien effects.)

Blomkamp set "District 9" in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was born and raised, so it's easy to assume his themes of racial division are a metaphor for apartheid. You could interpret it that way, but its quick bursts of violence and urban warfare also feel like a statement on the war in Iraq; a private corporation tasked with keeping aliens away from humans is reminiscent of Blackwater.

Using his own short film, "Alive in Jo'burg," as a leaping-off point, Blomkamp creates a sensation of relevance and immediacy by combining fake news footage, real TV clips and documentary-style, hand-held camerawork. Meanwhile, the fantastic sight of a spaceship hovering over Johannesburg — trapped and unable to return home, its former inhabitants scurrying about on the ground in squalor — creates an ominous and steady source of tension.

But he also builds suspense early on with a flurry of talking-head interviews from experts and insiders, all foreshadowing that something horrible has happened in the slum known as District 9, and that Copley's character, Wikus van der Merwe, was at the center of it.

"The entire world was looking at Johannesburg so we had to do the right thing," says one.

"Nobody saw it coming at all," says another.

Wikus seems a rather ordinary sort in his own on-camera interviews: sunny, jumpy, a bit like Ricky Gervais' character, David Brent, on the British version of "The Office." He lives in a nondescript suburban house with his wife; his father-in-law is his boss. Everything seems to be in order.

But what's fascinating is watching his true nature emerge as he interacts with the aliens once he enters their camp and tries to evict them. He becomes slick, conniving, almost cruel. And what's even more riveting is the way his dramatic exposure to these creatures — known pejoratively as "prawns" for their antenna and hard shells — doesn't necessarily make him a better person all of a sudden.

There is so much more to say from this point but doing so would ruin the many twists and revelations in store. We'll just say that Wikus adapts — he learns how to survive — in a place where there are no easy answers.

"District 9," a TriStar Pictures release, is rated R for bloody violence and pervasive language. Running time: 113 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

This sci-fi flick about aliens living in internment camps is quickly becoming one of the most acclaimed movies of 2009- as far as American films it is up there with "Up" and "The Hurt Locker" in terms of reviews. Probably too dark, strange and gory for the Oscars, outside of technical noms, but I could see the often contrarian National Society of Film Critics giving it top prizes. Actually with the best first feature category the NY Critics could give it a big prize as well.

A grade A review from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY...

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Were they not tentacled, claw-handed creatures from another planet with bodies like steel-plated shellfish, the ghetto-dwelling underclass in the madly original, cheekily 
 political, altogether exciting District 9 would look much like any refugee population: They miss home, they're discriminated against, and they're driven by overcrowding, squalor, and hunger to acts of violence that make the local populace hate them even more and wish them good riddance. And that's exactly the point of this great mind-stretcher of a sci-fi actioner — surely the first flying-saucer-and-mayhem movie in which aliens touch down on Earth by way of Johannesburg, rather than a more glamorous port of call. It's no accident that the aliens' massive spacecraft stalls out over South Africa, uniting the citizenry (with its own 
 infamous history of us-against-them racism) against a population humans of every color can despise. South African-born director Neill Blomkamp knows the history of his homeland.

The political resonance is sharp. But the movie wears its allegorical flourishes lightly. 
A thinking person's sci-fi movie from an inventive director of shorts and TV commercials, District 9 revels in the fun of mashing up
 narrative styles, with much of the footage presented as if shot by a documentary team on the scene. (Cloverfield made merry with the same vérité conceit.) The action — and there's plenty — really takes off when a big corporation (any resemblance to Halliburton is...your call) is hired to move the creatures from the slumlike township in which they have been segregated to something like a concentration camp, something meaner and farther away.

Not in my backyard! cry the good people of Jo'burg about the crustacean-shaped species derogatorily called Prawns. A rule-bound company man named Wikus (played by Sharlto Copley in a killer feature-acting debut) is 
selected to implement the massive relocation. Understandably, nothing runs smoothly — especially once Wikus starts poking around the shanty home of a Prawn who's a good dad to his shrimp of a kid — and, it turns out, a powerful scientist with a homegrown workshop. Viva the Prawn revolution! What begins with ''news'' footage out of South Africa ends with headline news here at home: District 9 proves that there's intelligent alien life in the movie universe this summer. A

I have a question- does "Entertainment Weekly"'s parent company, Time Warner stand to profit from "District 9" being a hit. I'm glad that the reviews are all good, and I understand that the buzz started at Comic-Con, but it hasn't been that big at least in Phoenix. Then out of nowhere, "EW" does a cover story, before it comes out, basically calling it the most talked-about movie of the summer and how it is going to be a blockbuster.

I was very put off by the article, which was basically a 4-5 page ad for a film I hadn't heard of.

I'm all for entertainment publications championing small quality pictures, but something about the entire article and placement just hit me wrong.

That said, I will go see the movie, lol!

A *** review from Roger Ebert...

by Roger Ebert

I suppose there’s no reason the first alien race to reach the Earth shouldn’t look like what the cat threw up. After all, they love to eat cat food. The alien beings in “District 9,” nicknamed “prawns” because they look like a cross between lobsters and grasshoppers, arrive in a space ship that hovers over Johannesburg. Found inside, huddled together and starving to death, are the aliens, who benefit from a humanitarian impulse to relocate them to a location on the ground.

Here they become not welcomed but feared, and their camp turns into a prison. Fearing alien attacks, humans demand they be resettled far from town, and a clueless bureaucrat named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is placed in charge of this task. The creatures are not eager to move. A private security force, headed by van der Merwe, moves in with armored vehicles and flame-throwers to encourage them, and van der Merwe cheerfully destroys houses full of their young.


Who are these aliens? Where did they come from? How did their ship apparently run out of power (except what’s necessary to levitate its massive tonnage?). No one asks: They’re here, we don’t like them, get them out of town. There doesn’t seem to be a lot to like. In appearance, they’re loathsome, in behavior disgusting and evoke so little sympathy that killing one is like — why, like dropping a 7-foot lobster into boiling water.

This science-fiction fable, directed by newcomer Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter (“The Lord of the Rings”) Jackson, takes the form of a mockumentary about van der Merwe’s relocation campaign, his infection by an alien virus, his own refuge in District 9 and his partnership with the only alien who behaves intelligently and reveals, dare we say, human emotions. This alien, named Christopher Johnson — yes, Christopher Johnson — has a secret workspace where he prepares to return to the mothership and help his people.

Much of the plot involves the obsession of the private security firm in learning the secret of the alien weapons, which humans cannot operate. Curiously, none of these weapons seem superior to those of the humans and aren’t used to much effect by the aliens in their own defense. Never mind. After van der Merwe grows a lobster claw in place of a hand, he can operate the weapons, and thus becomes the quarry of both the security company and the Nigerian gangsters, who exploit the aliens by selling them cat food. All of this is presented very seriously.

The film’s South African setting brings up inescapable parallels with its now-defunct apartheid system of racial segregation. Many of them are obvious, such as the action to move a race out of the city and to a remote location. Others will be more pointed in South Africa. The title “District 9” evokes Cape Town’s historic District 6, where Cape Coloureds (as they were called then) owned homes and businesses for many years before being bulldozed out and relocated. The hero’s name, van der Merwe, is not only a common name for Afrikaners, the white South Africans of Dutch descent, but also the name of the protagonist of van der Merwe jokes, of which the point is that the hero is stupid. Nor would it escape a South African ear that the alien language incorporates clicking sounds, just as Bantu, the language of a large group of African apartheid targets.

Certainly this van der Merwe isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree. Wearing a sweater vest over a short-sleeve shirt, he walks up to alien shanties and asks them to sign a relocation consent form. He has little sense of caution, which is why he finds himself in his eventual predicament. What Neill Blomkamp somehow does is make Christopher Johnson and his son, Little CJ, sympathetic despite appearances. This is achieved by giving them, but no other aliens, human body language, and little CJ even gets big wet eyes, like E.T.

“District 9” does a lot of things right, including giving us aliens to remind us not everyone who comes in a spaceship need be angelic, octopod or stainless steel. They are certainly alien, all right. It is also a seamless merger of the mockumentary and special effects (the aliens are CGI). And there’s a harsh parable here about the alienation and treatment of refugees.

But the third act is disappointing, involving standard shoot-out action. No attempt is made to resolve the situation, and if that’s a happy ending, I’ve seen happier. Despite its creativity, the movie remains space opera and avoids the higher realms of science-fiction.

I’ll be interested to see if general audiences go for these aliens. I said they’re loathsome and disgusting, and I don’t think that’s just me. The movie mentions Nigerian prostitutes servicing the aliens, but wisely refrains from entertaining us with this spectacle.

A positive review from THE NEW YORK TIMES...

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: August 14, 2009

For decades — at least since Orson Welles scared the daylights out of radio listeners with “War of the Worlds” back in 1938 — the public has embraced the terrifying prospect of alien invasion. But what if, notwithstanding the occasional humanist fable like “E.T.,” all those movies and television programs have been inculcating a potentially toxic form of interplanetary prejudice?

“District 9,” a smart, swift new film from the South African director Neill Blomkamp (who now lives in Canada and who wrote the screenplay with Terri Tatchell), raises such a possibility in part by inverting an axiomatic question of the U.F.O. genre. In place of the usual mystery — what are they going to do to us? — this movie poses a different kind of hypothetical puzzle. What would we do to them? The answer, derived from intimate knowledge of how we have treated one another for centuries, is not pretty.

A busy opening flurry of mock-news images and talking-head documentary chin scratching fills in a grim, disturbingly plausible scenario. Back in the 1980s a giant spacecraft stalled in the skies over Johannesburg. On board were a large number of starving and disoriented creatures, who were rescued and placed in a temporary refugee camp in the part of the city that gives the film its title. Over the next 20 years the settlement became a teeming shantytown like so many others in the developing world, with the relatively minor distinction of being home to tall, skinny bipeds with insectlike faces and bodies that seem to combine biological and mechanical features. Though there is evidence that those extraterrestrials — known in derogatory slang as prawns because of their vaguely crustacean appearance — represent an advanced civilization, their lives on Earth are marked by squalor and dysfunction. And they are viewed by South Africans of all races with suspicion, occasional pity and xenophobic hostility.

The South African setting hones the allegory of “District 9” to a sharp topical point. That country’s history of apartheid and its continuing social problems are never mentioned, but they hardly need to be. And the film’s implications extend far beyond the boundaries of a particular nation, which is taken as more or less representative of the planet as a whole.

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent. And casual bigotry turns out to be the least of the problems facing the exiles. As it progresses, “District 9” uncovers a horrific program of medical experimentation yoked to a near-genocidal agenda of corporate greed. A company called M.N.U. (it stands, none too subtly, for Multi-National United) has taken over administration of the prawn population, which means resettling the aliens in a remote enclosure reminiscent of the Bantustans of the apartheid era.

The M.N.U. executive charged with carrying out this program is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a nervous nebbish whose father-in-law (Louis Minnaar) is the head of the company. Cowardly, preening and hopeless at projecting authority, Wikus is the kind of guy who gives nepotism a bad name. It says a lot about Mr. Blomkamp’s sense of humor, and about his view of his own species, that this pathetic little paper pusher is his chosen agent of mankind’s potential moral redemption.

But I’m getting ahead of the story, and perhaps overselling the allegory. Not that the metaphorical resonances of “District 9” aren’t rich and thought provoking. But the filmmakers don’t draw them out with a heavy, didactic hand. Instead, in the best B-movie tradition, they embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).

The early pseudo-documentary conceit, which uses footage that pretends to have been harvested from news choppers and security cameras as well as some by the unseen crew accompanying Wikus on his tour of the prawn camp, fades away after a while. The academic authorities do too, having served the dual functions of providing narrative exposition and demonstrating the high-minded uselessness of official liberal discourse.

Once a terrible accident befalls Wikus, we are at his side and under his skin, and “District 9” subtly shifts from speculative science fiction to zombie bio-horror and then, less subtly, turns into an escape-action-chase movie full of explosions, gunplay and vehicular mayhem.

In the midst of it all you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing and the inventiveness of the special effects. Not the least of these are the aliens themselves, who are made expressive and soulful without quite being anthropomorphized. (Their whirring, clicking speech, partly understood by Wikus and others who work with the creatures, is translated for the rest of us via subtitles.)

One in particular, named Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), becomes Wikus’s protector and ward, and their relationship turns “District 9,” in its final act, into an intergalactic buddy picture, with some intriguing (and also possibly disappointing) sequel opportunities left open.

At its core the film tells the story — hardly an unfamiliar one in the literature of modern South Africa — of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes aware of the injustice that keeps him in his place and the others, his designated inferiors, in theirs. The cost he pays for this knowledge is severe, as it must be, given the dreadful contours of the system. But if the film’s view of the world is bleak, it is not quite nihilistic. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated.

“District 9” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense violence and violent swearing in the languages of two planets.

A very positive review from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES...

By Betsy Sharkey FILM CRITIC >>>

August 14, 2009

Set in South Africa in the not too distant past, the riveting "District 9" begins nearly three decades after a monstrous spaceship lost power over Johannesburg. There it sits still, suspended over the city like a giant metal thundercloud.

These are stormy days indeed inside District 9, the refugee camp just outside the city built to deal with the huge alien population left stranded by the broken craft. It's one of those "separate but equal" shantytowns reeking of garbage and growing dissatisfaction among the Prawns, which is as good a slur as any for a race of creatures who look like tall, two-legged ****roach/lobsters on steroids.

"District 9" is very smart sci-fi, but that's just the beginning; it's also a scathing social satire hidden inside a terrific action thriller teeming with gross aliens and regrettable inter-species conflict. And it's a blast. . . .

Unemployment is rampant in District 9, healthcare is nonexistent -- unless you count those secret scientific experiments -- and crime is on the rise, helped along by a Nigerian mafia that specializes in guns and ammo. The Prawns spend their days brawling and getting drunk on cat food, which it turns out they have a serious weakness for, sending cat food prices soaring. The locals are fed up and pushing for segregation, again, in South Africa. Don't we ever learn?

Meanwhile, the Prawns just want to go home. They still don't speak English, and humans don't understand much of their synthesized screeches, so what we have here is a failure to communicate (though subtitles help us out).

The film opens on a drab, workstation-filled floor in what turns out to be headquarters for MNU, the organization well compensated by the world for managing the aliens. A mass resettlement of District 9 is about to get underway, with news cameras rolling and talking heads covering every bit of minutia.

Director Neill Blomkamp, who wrote the screenplay with Terri Tatchell, uses the 24-hour news cycle and its panel of experts to fill out the film's complex back story in a form that feels frighteningly familiar. But as with everything else about "District 9," there's more to it than that.

At the center of our story is a pocket-protector MNU middle manager named Wikus Van De Merwe, played by Sharlto Copley, well known in South African film and television circles. He's an unlikely hero, with the demeanor of a '50s-era science teacher in a short-sleeve white shirt and horn rims (in a very loose way the film has a 1950s feel). Wikus has been picked to oversee the resettlement project in part because he's an ordinary Joe who the higher-ups think will play well on TV, with its live news feed transmitting his every move.

But like a reality TV show gone terribly wrong (or right), bad things begin to happen once Wikus steps inside the district, with a series of accidents and events turning him into a wanted man.

You can feel his pain as he realizes that the company he's spent a lifetime working for has abandoned him when he needs it most.

A great deal of action and insight accompanies Wikus as he tries to evade authorities and the medical teams who are suddenly quite interested in his alien exposure. He finds allies where he least expects them, among the Prawns, specifically a strategic leader named Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) and his young prawn spawn, little C.J., who is bright, funny and created completely by special effects, so they say.

Despite the language barriers, understanding grows and, not surprisingly, Wikus begins to see another side of things, aliens driven by needs not unlike his own.

Violence of varying stripes runs through the film, and within the bloody mess some very nifty camera work is going on. As bullets penetrate flesh or crack shell, the camera shifts, throwing you right in the middle of things, the pieces raining down around you.

It's like nothing I've experienced, and if they'd gone 3-D with it, I'd have probably run for cover.

The action sequences are aggressive and extensive. The metal eco-skeletons that the aliens can slip into and the assault rifles they pick up are theirs exclusively because the machines respond only to alien DNA.

The choice to make the aliens particularly gross is an intriguing one. No ethereal eyes to peer into, no close encounters desired, given the rows of nasty-looking pincers on their bellies. It's a lot to get past on the road to tolerance.

Humor, and there is that too, comes in the form of irony. But then Blomkamp has seeded irony and analogies throughout "District 9" as he makes his way through a myriad of modern anxieties including the racial divide, class differences, big business, broadcast news and the big-brother world of reality TV.

One of the many themes Blomkamp kicks around is the numbing effect of the endless loop of information and analysis on cable news. By moving between narratives -- the world view created by the news reports and Wikus' unfolding reality -- the filmmaker has created a secondary horror story. Not a new idea, just particularly chilling in its execution here.

In many ways, "District 9" echoes the cautionary tales of such sci-fi classics as "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Others will see a more direct predecessor in 1988's "Alien Nation," but it turns out to be just a shadow of "District 9."

Though the themes are universal, the director's childhood in South Africa clearly informs the film's sensibility, in this case greatly adding to its distinctive look and feel. It's an impressive first feature for the 29-year-old Blomkamp.

In a good summer, there's usually a movie that will come out of nowhere and completely wow us. This is a good summer, and that movie is "District 9."