I’ve waited a bit to write a review of District 9 simply because I felt I needed to think about it a bit before I set my thoughts down. Let me say this first: if District 9 is any indication of the future of SF movies, then finally (finally!) we’re on the right track. For all its flaws, District 9 is a powerful, moving bit of storytelling.

District 9 sets itself (at least in the first twenty minutes, and at varying spots throughout the rest) as a kind of documentary following the forced relocation of aliens (literally, aliens from another world, nicknamed “prawns” by humans) from one camp to another to move them further away from the human population which has (with some justification) gotten intolerant with them. Wikus Van Der Merwe is the man chosen by the private military contractor, MNU, to head the relocation.

Wikus (played by Sharlto Copley) is so much more an everyman than I’ve seen in a movie ever. Copley deserves an Oscar nomination for his role. He is very much a simple man put in an impossible position, unaware (at first) of his own bigotry, and like so many bigots thinking that his flippant, shallow kindnesses are some sign of highmindedness. Of course, compared to the soldiers accompanying him, they are.

During the relocation, Wikus is exposed to some alien compound which slowly and surely turns him into one of the aliens himself. There are unanswered questions about this, a serious plot hole in the movie, but never horribly distracting. But Wikus’ transformation makes him valuable to his company–alien weapons can only be fired by aliens, and now the hybrid Wikus.

Now, here is where the movie tugs on some Hollywood cliches that it could well have avoided. The simple fact is that the relocation was always going to be a mess and violent. But the filmmakers felt like they needed a more active bad guy, so there is entire subplot about weapons and biological weapons acquisition that was completely unnecessary. A few mustache-twirling military guys were thrown in, with the accompanying evil corporate types. But I think the movie would have played better if it had stuck to the mutual human-alien intolerance bit. That alone would have provided enough tension to drive the movie. Instead, for a good bit of the first half of the movie, the subplot becomes drab, slow and predictable.

However, once the movie expands beyond the typical Hollywood anti-corporate paranoia, it becomes both deep and wide. While it shares the fundamental source material as an entire generation of SF cliches, it manages not to draw on them too blatantly, and makes them its own. While any alien SF film engaging the tolerance question will immediately bring to mind Alien Nation and Enemy Mine (this movie is, strangely enough, more like the later than the former), District 9 manages to broaden the scope. At the center of this movie is the relationship between Wikus and a clever alien (presumably the ship’s pilot) named “Christopher Johnson” (it is strange and yet eerily plausible). It’s a predictable progression from antagonism to friendship, and one we’ve seen quite often, but given the fact that we can’t understand a single word the alien says the entire movie, I never felt like I didn’t know what he was saying. Most of this has to do with Copley, who carries the scenes better than one might expect. In the end, while the movie is certainly in the same class as other movies, it manages not to be a remake.

The alien character designs are phenomenal. One problem with these types of movies is that the aliens invariably look identical, without the natural variation that we see in humans. Usually this is simply a way of keeping the aliens bestial enough so that when our heroes start killing them, we’re not all that concerned. But District 9 makes them all unique, despite being all of a type. For the first time in a movie that uses CG characters, I can say there was hardly any bad compositing. I almost never felt like the aliens stood out as fake. Their interactions were seamless (save for a few moments) and thoroughly believable.

But having given us likable and sympathetic aliens, the movie gives us cliched humans to kill at the end. And far more humans die on screen than aliens. It is too bad, really, that the writers didn’t leave the humans at least somewhat sympathetic. Sure, they were enforcing a bad policy, and doing it badly, but to make them actively evil squashed an extra moral dimension the film could have had. Of course, then our hero would be killing good people.

Can’t have that.

Seriously, I think it’s time we had fully mature movies that recognized the conflict as something more than pure good against pure evil. Given how well the movie layered the moral gray areas at its beginning, I was somewhat disappointed that it resorted to reductionism in the end.

But I can set all that aside. In the end, the movie managed to do so many things right that I can’t help but recommend it. The action at its climax managed to avoid the flaws of recent action movies like Ironman and Hulk, in that it kept the conflict personal and intimate right to the end (although it did steal the very effective “inside-the-helmet” cam view from Ironman).

Best yet, the film has a conflicted, dirty, realistic ending that manages to be supremely satisfying while leaving me begging for District 10. I really, really want to see that movie.

What did this movie do right? The CG is virtually flawless. It cast unknowns, to great effect. The political overtones were secondary to the characters. (Wikus is such a goof about his wife! My god it makes you want to cry.) While the movie played to conventions, it managed to raise them to a new level. I can honestly say I’ve not seen such a good SF movie in a very long time. And despite being a more serious movie than most action-oriented SF, the action sequences here were superb.

What did it not do right? Hollywood cliches. I mean, really, a big bad corporation and a PMC? I’m really tired of this. The world is screwed up enough with people trying to do the right thing and failing. We don’t need cliched bad guys. It’s lazy storytelling. The other problem is the hybrid style of narrative and documentary. I made the same comment about The Assassination of Jesse James: sometimes the movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. Some of the interviews are incomprehensible. Some sections are repeated. District 9 pulls it off better than Jesse James did, but it was a bit of a whiplash on occasion. I’m not convinced this is a wise approach for movies.

Anyway, despite my complaints, everyone really ought to see this. And if you don’t tear up a little at the end you’re a heartless bastard.