District 9

J.J. Abrams needs to find a deep, dark cave. He needs to crawl inside that cave and when he has found the lowest chamber, a place as far as possible from a camera or script or Hollywood budget he must sit in the dark, alone, and think about what he has done. Maybe we'll slap him with a rolled-up newspaper or something first.

Star Trek, despite its many mistakes and inconsistencies, is a franchise that is literally awash with good ideas. It has exploration, war, intrigue, social and political commentary, ruminations not just on what it means to be human, or even humanoid, but on what it means to be alive -- even if you're a silicon-based rock-eating slug. It has a sense of wonder, hope for the future. It has bad episodes, bad movies, hell, it has bad series, but it has a brain. It has -- if you'll allow me to get metaphysical -- a soul.

Or at least it did until Abrams got his hands on it. Whether it was due to ham-handed idiocy or cold-hearted calculation, he stripped all the nuance and brains from Star Trek, flashed it up and made it just like every other boring sci-fi/action movie out there. Way to go.

You see, what Abrams doesn't get, and what District 9's Neill Blomkamp does is that sci-fi isn't just about lasers and spaceships.

To be clear, there ain't nothing wrong with lasers and spaceships.

However, good science fiction is about the society that uses the lasers and spaceships. You don't imagine technological and social advances because they look cool, you do it to create a unique lens through which to view human nature.

District 9's story is centered around two million alien refugees who become stranded on our planet when their mothership breaks down floating above Johannesburg, South Africa. Starving and desperate, they are brought to the surface and eventually forced into the apartheid-style slum for which the film is named.

Shuffled into the middle of this is our human protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. He's a dorky bureaucrat who finds himself in a position of authority just when the shit hits the fan.

The film is structured beautifully. The documentary-style framing allows Blomkamp to give us the exposition in a coherent manner without wasting to much time on it. Lots of other movies would be so in love with themselves they'd feel the need to waste twenty or thirty minutes just watching the mothership appear. District 9 has no time for such trivialities, however, and assumes we get it after a tight expository montage.

One of the film's biggest strengths is this frugal approach -- likely due to the fact that District 9 is an expansion of Blomkamp's 2005 short film Alive in Joburg. There is a small central cast of characters, and few gratuitous action sequences.

Do not mistake that sentence to mean that this film is not a balls out, heavy metal, face-peelingly violent ride, because it absolutely is. What makes it so good is that all that action actually matters. You know the characters so well and you are so intimately aware of the stakes that the action sucks you in like you're a part of it. I'm having trouble remembering many sci-fi films that had me this invested in the action since Star Wars.

The setting is so compelling because of its willingness to make us uncomfortable. It revels in how petty, conniving, self-serving and short-sighted people can be while deftly avoiding -- save maybe one or two brief incidents -- James Bond villain-style evil. We're dragged screaming through a sequence of little atrocities that never seem far-fetched, and are all the more horrific as a result.

Most importantly, however, District 9 is fresh. It towers above the wasteland of shitty remakes, revamps, sequels and adaptations. It was made because an artist had a story to tell, not because name recognition sells tickets. For that reason alone, you ought to see this film. Just as I have begged you to cease giving money to those who merely exhume the past in the hopes of getting upwards of nine dollars out of you because you can't resist nostalgia, I must now entreat you to support honest and heartfelt artistic expression.

Go see District 9.