DISTRICT 9 satisfies my brain and my boy parts

At the beginning of the year, only two dates on my movie calendar were circled. May 29 for Pixar's UP and August 14 for DISTRICT 9. Fortunately for me (and my sanity), both movies absolutely fucking delivered.

DISTRICT 9 (2009)

It was a sad day for many when the much maligned Halo film project was canned.

On the other hand, it was a glorious day when Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp decided to make an intelligent and damn cool alien movie that will keep a tent pitched in my pants for the next couple days.

The tale of DISTRICT 9 starts off in the 80's when an alien craft comes to Earth and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. After a long period of inactivity, the ship is drilled into and found to contain nearly two million sickly worker aliens absent of their higher-ups. After being forced out of the ship and into a Johannesburg slum called District 9, multinational weapons and research organization MNU takes over control of the camp, looking to harness alien technology and weaponry for profit. Upon a new task to evict the aliens into the new concentration-camp-like District 10, MNU operative Wilkus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) accidentally comes in contact with an alien substance, which of course leads to proverbial shit hitting the proverbial fan.

DISTRICT 9 makes some fairly obvious allusions to apartheid and racism, but instead of ever becoming overtly and annoyingly preachy, DISTRICT 9 presents a methodical real-world documentary that transitions to a steroid-induced alien action flick. By no means mistake this for a bad thing as DISTRICT 9 presents a final act as tense and as awesome as you'll see in any science fiction film crafted in the last two decades; an action finale so savvily crafted that I don't know if I can ever look at alien films or projectile pigs in the same light again.

Newcomer Neill Blomkamp's direction is fabulous. Though the documentary aesthetic trend is nothing particularly new these days, its use in DISTRICT 9 heightens the sense of realism to alarming levels. As a sci-fi/alien movie nerd, this particularly tickled my balls. I don't know about everyone else, but I wanna know what happens when aliens land and Will Smith isn't there to talk to them in ebonics. Also on display is South African actor Sharlto Copley (Wikus), a virtual one-man bravado of a performance on which the entire weight of the film's narrative rests.

While DISTRICT 9's unconventional real-life documentary feel may leave casual viewers cold, DISTRICT 9 appeals to the desires of every virgin sci-fi fan that sacrificed two hours jacking it to Pokemon for two hours of basking in DISTRICT 9's glory. DISTRICT 9 never falls to TRANSFORMERS levels of retarded, and while big CGI set pieces can be feasts for the eyes, DISTRICT 9's sparkling visual effects coupled with fuckin' sweet and relatively grounded action and an original story that feels eerily real make DISTRICT 9 a must see for any self-respecting sci-fi fan (or any self-respecting dude, for that matter).

I wanna see this again and again until my balls are empty of my man juices and I am no longer physically capable of producing the chemicals that define me as a male. Don't get me wrong, though. While DISTRICT 9 is a killer action flick, it's a science fiction film that the genre needs. A tremendous and welcome boost in originality and sheer cool factor, DISTRICT 9 is a breath of fresh air that everyone needs to take.

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