Blu-ray: District 9 (2009)

One of the best science-fiction releases of 2009, District 9 takes its name from a fictional shantytown in Johannesburg, South Africa. The district was built some years prior to the film’s setting to house a group of aliens whose apparently lifeless spaceship arrived out of nowhere only to come to a grinding halt and float, seemingly useless, above the city skyline.

The film starts in a fake-documentary style following one Wikus van der Merwe, an administrative employee of the unimaginatively named multinational conglomerate MultiNational Unlimited (MNU), who by an act of nepotism has been tasked with moving the slum’s residents to a new camp outside the city. This style fades unobtrusively to the background as the plot and action build, allowing the film to wind up into an explosive spectacle. This is not to say, however, that the film relies on mere visual trickery or pyrotechnics to entertain and interest.

In fact, although packed with wonderfully executed special effects and computer graphic inserts there’s more to District 9 than a blockbuster of the Michael-Bay-explodes-a-helicopter variety. The South African setting makes clear the allegorical nature of a storyline in which a subset of the population are isolated, demonised and mistreated, but the film manages to avoid coming across as a simple morality tale, and Wikus as a believable human character rather than a simple hero or villain.

The plot can of course be enjoyed equally on DVD but this Blu-ray edition makes the most of the film’s rather good visual effects, and some of the more explosive scenes are also ideal for those who want to test out surround-sound setups. The disc extras aren’t remarkable, but include fairly interesting documentaries on various aspects of the film’s creation.