I just finished District 9, and honestly, it’s a pretty good watch.
The idea behind it is the first thing worth talking about. Yes, it’s another alien movie on the surface, but it doesn’t go down the usual path of aliens invading Earth and humans fighting back. Instead, it flips the whole setup around and focuses on humans forcing the aliens out. That alone already gives the movie something interesting to say.
The aliens themselves are worth a closer look too. I honestly have no idea what was going through the director’s head when he came up with that shrimp-like design. Was it inspired by some twisted version of “hero” or “great master”? Just kidding. In any case, the choice is unusual enough to stand out, even if their mouths and those teeth were honestly pretty disgusting to me. What’s kind of funny is that the young aliens in the film really are just little shrimps—basically the ones humans cage up and make fight each other for entertainment.
The story follows a group of these shrimp-like aliens who have ended up living on Earth for reasons that are never fully explained, and who are then forced to relocate to District 10. During the move, the main character accidentally gets sprayed with the energy substance the aliens have been carefully collecting. After that, his DNA starts to change, and his body gradually takes on alien traits. That’s where the real conflict starts: the aliens’ weapons are locked to DNA recognition, so humans can’t use them, but the mutated Wikus can handle them with ease.
At one point, the scientist in the lab says something like, his fate doesn’t matter—the important thing is what they can get from him. That line stuck with me. At first, I thought Wikus was pretty foolish: too soft-hearted, too talkative, always rambling on, and even trying to get the aliens to sign some kind of eviction agreement. But by the time I got to that part, I actually started feeling sorry for him.
His relationship with the big alien—whose name I’ve completely forgotten—also does a good job of showing the human side of the story. They team up, split apart, and then team up again, and all of that makes the film’s view of humanity feel sharper. At first, Wikus cooperates with the alien because he hears there may be a way to cure himself. They go after the fuel together. But when he learns the alien will have to wait three years before coming back to help him, he gets angry and knocks the alien out.
By the end, with the coalition forces chasing him relentlessly and his future more or less already decided, Wikus finally understands what matters. When he says, “You have to go home, or everything I did will have been for nothing,” the change in him feels completely natural.
As for the characters, I especially liked the little alien. He’s adorable, smart, and speaks in such a cute way that it’s hard not to love him. And while watching, I kept feeling like the image was shaking a bit, almost as if the whole thing was lagging. I couldn’t tell whether that was intentional or just my computer acting up, but either way it made the film a little tiring to watch.
