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Twenty years after they arrived in a broken spaceship, extra-terrestrial aliens in District 9 are being forcibly moved into another camp further away from Johannesburg and humans. MNU bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe is put in charge of serving the eviction notices to the "prawns." 6/10 Perhaps surprisingly for a film featuring mistreatment of a group of beings set in South Africa, Neill Blomkamp’s star-making (of himself) directorial debut doesn’t seem to have anything in the way of convincing social commentary or dramatic depth. Thanks to a stupid, foul-mouthed, quickly unlikeable but cringingly convincing lead character (after being exposed to alien fluid and having his arm broken he refuses to go to hospital claiming ‘he’s okay’) and an off-the-shelf plot, it’s left to the technical rather than dramatic elements of Blomkamp’s film to keep the audience’s attention and, on this level, he delivers a visually remarkable movie full of completely convincing and imaginative visual effects achieved at a fraction of the 9-figure budget this kind of movie normally costs. This movie contains frequent sexual swear words, adult dialogue and extremely graphic and extreme violence, gory and extremely unpleasant scenes.
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