The Peter Jackson produced District 9 blew me away, but to truly explain why I have to delve into what I think goes into a great movie.

The movies that I really like (love is such a strong word) as in beyond “Hey that was fun and didn’t mind spending that money to enjoy 2 hours or so of entertainment,” but more along the lines of “Hey, I’m really glad I spent that money to be thoroughly entertained for those 2 hours or so of my life” - anyway, the movies that I really like usually have one thing in common: they go beyond what I expected of them, what they seemed to promise, and what their genre usually accomplishes. Examples: Casablanca - goes beyond being just one of the greatest (if not THE greatest) love story of all time and expands beyond romance into drama, comedy, and even political thriller, transcends genre and any expectation you might have for a 1940s romance movie; The Notebook - again billed by many as your common romance, but there’s so much more to this movie; just like Casablanca it has comedy, but more than anything what makes this movie transcend it’s genre and expectations is the actors and most of all the well put together story - I genuinely believe this is a great movie because it is put together and told so well (I’ll have to write more about The Notebook later). Those are two examples off the top of my head. Given time, I could probably come up with a lot more - but the common denominator would no doubt be that there’s something about the movie that makes it transcend normal genre roles for me.

District 9 is definitely in that category. The previews were awesome in that they disguised a lot of what the movie was about. All they really told you was that it contained elements of Science Fiction, was shot in a documentary style, and had some action elements (if i remember correctly there’s some shots of action in the previews - of course this depends on which one you saw), but they didn’t actually introduce you to the main characters or show any parts of the story other than the concept of the film - aliens are stuck in and above Johannesburg.

So my expectation going in was that the movie would be mostly sci-fi based. I didn’t expect something like Doom, but I thought it would mostly be a sort of basic man versus alien vibe - obviously I hadn’t read a lot about the film. The film went WAY beyond any sense of the Sci-Fi genre I had previously experienced. It had elements of sci-fi, hardcore action (no, not porn - though it does cover the issue of inter-species prostitution), political thriller, racial (or really inter-species) politics, and it was allegorical as a cave with shadows where a bunch of dudes are chained to the wall. There are a lot of great things about this movie (the acting is great, it’s shot superbly, nothing goes the way you think it will, it has a happy - if ambiguous - ending, and of course big guns), but what really blew me away was how seamlessly the movie moved between genres and styles. Put simply, the movie starts as a documentary on the aliens then moves to a more action/thriller type of movie, then goes back to the documentary while mixing in the political, racial, and of course Sci-Fi elements - all with a South African accent!

Additionally, the film’s greatest success comes in its dehumanizing humans. The film shows us the tragedies happening to these aliens and the cruelty that people are able to impart upon those they deem as “others.” It’s horrifying. The moral “compromises” that occur in the film (and are usually perpetrated by the humans) are much more disturbing than watching the aliens rip a human’s head off. The fact that the film can swing this type of emotional change in us as viewers speaks to the power of the film. That’s the type of movie I can get behind, remember, and talk about for hours.

But I won’t do that here.