After three days of torture Christ Jesus Christopher Johnson flies up into the sky with a promise to return and save his people. Some on the right speculate he’ll return violently.

Saul Wikus starts as a member of The Sanhedrin MNU, persecuting the outsiders because messianic cults prawns aren’t kosher. Eventually he converts to the cause, becoming St. Paul an alien.

There’re no plots like the old plots, eh Blomkamp? It’s about time someone did more Alien Nation, anyway. Cat food? Milk? Get it? Anybody? Is this thing on?

District 9 has a couple of problems with characterization. First, Wikus (the protag.) is an annoying unintelligent coward — even after he’s had his catalytic I-have-the-Golden-Fleece hero-moment. He’s very hard to get on-side with as a protagonist. This, though, could well have been by design. I could see humanity being very difficult to get along with, very stupid and fickle, if a being wasn’t used to us.

Wikus is a complex character, fine, but you really need complex villains for difficult protagonists to shine. The villain in the story is humanity, but that’s far too big to make dramatic sense. We whittle it down to MNU, okay, a couple of bad old-guy corporate-cog suits but still too nebulous to really work. Our antagonist targeting systems settle on Venter, the terminal testosterone case merc death-squad leader.

Except just being a fascist jock with a gun really isn’t enough characterization to make Venter an effective foil for Wikus, and so the protagonist’s characterization crumbles. Without Vader, Luke is just a whining farm boy — our enemies bring out the best in us.

Setting is the third character, and it’s almost there. The mockumentary style has problems when you stray from it to do private scenes — suspension of disbelief gets a bit turbulent. The movie I would have liked to see would have shown Venter as a soldier guarding humanity from the violent prawns. Get us on his side, then show his fall: One day a prawn eats his wife and kid. Okay, now there’s a reason Venter hates the aliens, a reason he’s a mercenary for MNU, and as a special bonus we’re on his side because prawns are scary.

Then we segue to Mikus the slum administrator and build even more rapport with him — he’s kinda brave protecting us from those mean aliens. Finally my imaginary version of the film shows us that we were wrong to hate — we build sympathy with the visitors as normal — but Venter can’t forgive and forget so he’s destroyed.

Then Venter isn’t one dimensional, he’s tragic. Mikus gets a good foil which explains his vacillation somewhat more, and the setting is used to pull the audience in and really hammer the theme. Our point of view shifts from Venter’s to Mikus’, from Legion-backed-Sanhedrin to Disciples of the Living Christ. Oh well, missed opportunity.

On the whole I quite liked it. The graphics are very tight, helped by the shakeycam and use of authentic humans (bumping through the uncanny valley). The gun battles are pretty good — the alien weapons fun.

The exposition of the back story is masterful and the first contact scenario’s premise is satisfyingly unique: Aliens show up and we have to cut our way in to the derelict saucer and rescue them with our awful state-of-the-art social workers. The cognitive dissonance that idea created in me had the pleasantly discomforting quality that theory generates when it slams into reality. “Wait, these are aliens with an interstellar craft and we have to give them aid? Fucking reality never works out how you expect…”