District 9
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 3.0
Jittery sci-fi movie has a sufficient amount of intellect (the Apartheid 'subtext') and action (gore galore!), as a government worker whose job it is to kick the (actual) aliens out of their homes becomes a 'half-breed' (half-human, half monster) himself when he comes into contact with a strange liquid. The camera gets a little too frenetic at times and can act as a distraction, but the CGI is surprisingly good - there's enough of the human element to keep it from becoming too much of a filmed video game (Blomkamp was supposed to direct the adaptation of Halo, and this is close). Action movies tend to lose this kind of balance: they become so focused on the technical that they forget it has to have some kind of point: here, it's about degrees of humanity, of ostracizing those different from us.
