MOVIE REVIEW: ‘District 9’

“District 9” is an odd melange of a movie: part fake documentary, part body horror, part office comedy and part “Mechwarrior.” Neill Blomkamp’s new film manages to feel fresh and exciting without actually bringing anything groundbreaking to the table. It’s a rousing and entertaining film, if a little hollow.

“District 9” posits an alternate Earth on which aliens landed above Johannesburg 28 years ago. Leaderless and starving, the aliens were given a slum (the eponymous district, D-9 for short) in which to live, and a Blackwater-like organization of mercenaries and bureaucrats (Multi-National United, or MNU) was tasked with keeping them separate from humankind. MNU is less interested in ensuring the health and happiness of their charges than discovering how to make their advanced weaponry work.

As the movie opens, the prawn (as the aliens are derisively called) of D-9 are about to be forcibly moved to a new area away from Johannesburg. Leading the evictions is inept MNU staffer Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley); his exploits are being filmed by a documentary crew, and their footage (along with interviews from nongovernmental organization activists and Wikus’ family members) make up the bulk of the film, which documents Wikus’ change into an alien-human hybrid.

This faux-documentary stylistic choice has its advantages - it lends “District 9” a sense of immediacy and helps paper over some of the more glaring plot holes. It also has its limits, one of which is a fixed point of view: We see only what the documentarian sees. The omniscient viewpoint typical of a narrative feature would have permitted Mr. Blomkamp to fully examine the motives of the prawn and MNU when they are outside of Wikus’ view.

In order to work around that problem, the convention is simply dropped: About midway through, “District 9” cheats, jumping between a fake documentary and a purely narrative affair in order to fill the gaps in the audience’s knowledge.

By sometimes dropping the documentary style, “District 9” avoids the problem of “Cloverfield,” “Diary of the Dead” and “The Blair Witch Project,” films in which a character has to repeatedly explain why he’s still filming something instead of running for his life. But at the same time, Mr. Blomkamp introduces a new problem: He reminds the audience that they are, in fact, watching a fictional narrative and not a documentary.

The breaking of the illusion is unfortunate because the special effects are almost good enough to immerse the audience in the action entirely. The digital creations are seamlessly integrated into the story, and the action sequences are impressively choreographed, combining to create a most impressive illusion. The action Mr. Blomkamp brings to the screen rivals “Star Trek’s” for the most thrilling of the summer.

Get used to hearing about Mr. Blomkamp; he’s the hot new thing in young action directors. Scooped from obscurity by “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson to direct the (currently on hiatus) film adaptation of the video game “Halo,” Mr. Blomkamp makes us care about Wikus and the prawns, infusing the effects-laden sequences with a heightened tension missing from the summer’s more lackluster fare.

★★★

TITLE: “District 9”

RATING: R (bloody violence and pervasive language)

CREDITS: Directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by Mr. Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell

RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes

WEB SITE: www.d-9.com

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