District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

Aliens have come to Earth, and for once it's not New York or L.A. they've ended up over, but Johannesburg. This is just the first of refreshing twists to the usual first contact scenario. More follow: they turn out to be neither unstoppable invaders nor more spiritually evolved, but disempowered dregs of their society, uncultured and ill-tempered, with a cat-food fixation to boot. And humanity's best response to the unwanted new burden is to seek to lose them in the labyrinths of the social security system, an underclass to be bamboozled with legalese and shunted from shantytown to shantytown. The allegory with the apartheid situation of the past is so central that its lack of subtlety is even an asset, enforced by the blackly satirical documentary style.
Then, as a government official assigned the task of relocating the undesirables to an internment camp is exposed to chemicals which cause him to begin transmuting into one of the loathsome 'prawns', the film begins to veer off course. His change is a disintegration straight out of Cronenberg's The Fly, the authorities turn on him as a potential bioweapon to be exploited à la Robocop, and by the end we're in an unending township gun battle which is uncertainly pitched between African militia warfare and Transformers, with a murderous Nigerian gang after all providing the barbaric black villains we thought might have been avoided. It's a pity because the initial premise suggested much more. Marks for novel details, then, but not the final outcome in an uneven ride.

6/10