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Blog by Don Kennedy

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District 9

District 9 starts two decades after an alien ship has stalled above one of the world’s largest cities and as one sympathetic talking head scribe points out, it did not happen over some American city - but curiously says it rightfully happened over Johannesburg South Africa. The irony becomes apparent when after 20 years some one million extra terrestrials rescued from the drifting mother ship are sequestered in District 9, a squalid shanty town a la the shameful Apartheid days. Billed as a humanitarian exercise the hidden agenda is corporate lusting over the other worldly arrivals confiscated weaponry which is superior but does not function if the operators DNA originates on earth. One of the first characters that we meet is Wikus Van De Merwe (South Africa’s outstanding Sharlto Copley) who goes from channelling Peter Seller in The Party to channelling Sigornay Weaver at her exosuited, bitch-slapping best. He’s a low level exec with the evil arms company called MNU that seems to have privatized law enforcement. Wikus is given the job of moving the alien concentration camp to a more remote location but in discovering that the alien’s have their own secret agenda he’s infected with a virus that starts to morph his DNA into theirs. After escaping vivisection by his current masters, Wikus joins forces his new brethren in hopes of being cured. Written and directed by Johannesburg’s Neill Blomkamp just 11 years after graduating from Vancouver Film School's 3D Animation and Visual Effects program makes this movie accomplishment all the more stunning. District 9 is this years Cloverfield and then some. It’s a Sci-Fi masterpiece that makes most alien-among-us movies look like Plan 9 from Outer Space.

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