District 9, wow what a pleasant surprise this movie was.  I seriously can’t say enough good things about it.  But let’s see if I can try.

For those of you who don’t know, District 9 is a movie about the Alien occupation of a small section of Johannesburg.  And by Alien, I mean creatures/being from outer space.  In the movie timeline 28 years ago a spacecraft came to Earth and took position over Johannesburg.  After two months of speculating, the military decided to take action and try entering the craft.  Upon doing so they discovered 1.8 million Aliens, which the call Prawns due to their looks, living in what we would consider poverty.  They begun moving the Prawns to District 9 in order to try to learn more about them.

The movie starts off with documentary detailing how their occupation of this District was causing more problems than solving.  The MNU (Multi-National United) is about to launch a movement which would evict the tenants of District 9 and move them into another District 200 km away from their current location.  And that’s where the fun starts.

This movie takes an in-depth look into how we as humans would react in an environment such as this.  It shows not only our “PC” stance on the situation but also the true face of horror.  Showing not only what we would see on the outside but also alot of what we wouldn’t see due to the media spin on it.

I loved it.  I loved every second of the movie.  It had to have been one of the only movies this summer that I walked into that wasn’t a sequel, a comic, or a movie based on a book or story of which I had already read.  It was nice to walk into the theater with an open mind, ready to be surprised and that I was.  The acting in this was pretty good.  Most of the characters that were seen were just side characters of a documentary but they managed to pull off their jobs well.  The main antagonist of the story did a great job in not only making me think he was a supreme dork but to also get me to hate him with every ire of my being.  In what had to be a twist of irony, the entire theater seemed to the be rooting for the Alien to return home, knowing that he was going to do so in order to get his friends and come back to whip our collective asses.

The FX were also top notch.  For what had to be a lower budget film, they did their best to pull out all of the stops.  The story had me from the word go and the action at the end had me on the edge of my seat.

This film took the best elements of Cloverfield and Blair Witch and any other “shaky cam” movie and improved on it without making the audience sick or bored.  If you haven’t had a chance to see this movie yet, then do yourself a favor and get out there and do so.  Hopefully you will be as surprised as I was.