Let me start off this review by letting you know that this will be pretty short and sweet because unlike the other movies you’ve seen in the past one, two, maybe even as many as 5 years, this movie has so many good things going for it that I can’t nag it and don’t want to ruin it by giving too much away.

In my opinion, every movie has hurtles to jump associated with every viewers willing suspension of disbelief. That is to say, you have to be willing to believe in various aspects of the story to really get into the movie. The first hurtle you have to jump concerning this movie, you confront before you ever see it. You know it’s going to have aliens.

Thing is once you get inside the theater, you realize that these aren’t just aliens; these are but fucking ugly aliens that have bodies that look like some kind of mutated, walking crayfish. What the creators of the movie did to make this a little easier to accept was place them in an environment that is completely alien to most of us. Africa.

All of us that know anything about Africa know that some crazy effed up shizat goes on in certain places that are along the lines of tribal customs and primitive thinking mixed with AIDS, cocaine, modern weapons and lots and lots of killing. Besides that, we know nothing, so pretty much anything the creators want to put in Africa as far as buildings, government, people and giant, floating alien ships go, we’ll kindly accept. The biggest thing that District 9 has going for it, however, is that it’s not easily comparable to any other recent film.

There are only two movies I can think to compare it to: Enemy Mine (1985) and Alien Nation (1988). I mean, there’s this guy, who’s totally anti-alien-on-my-planet and helps enforce human laws in the alien-inhabited concentration camps of Africa. Everyone hates them. They’re disgustingly different from us, so pretty much everyone just wants to shoot them in the face, but out of common decency we allow them to live in horrible conditions and depend on the scummiest, lowest cast of human society anywhere for survival: the crazy African mofos that eat the dead alien bodies in hopes of gaining their alien powers.

So, the main character is picking up contraband out of the camps, gets sprayed in the face with alien goo, and starts to morph into an alien. The government agency he works for wants to cut him apart to analyze him, but he’s surprisingly against being dissected. The only place he can ultimately run is to the shelters he normally visits to divvy out lolli-pops and brutal beatings. He forms, what he considers to be at the time, a horrible and disgusting alliance with an alien to get back that alien goo he took and the government now has so that the alien can cure him.

I know I’ve given away so much of the movie, but I won’t give away the ending, the climax, or even most of the other stuff leading up to the climax.

The short-winded information that I promised to give you is that the main character is dynamic and grows in personality, drive, motivation, personal beliefs, and even communicative ability as the movie progresses. The constant flow of action mixed with emotion never pauses and keeps you constantly enthralled for the entirety of the film. Oh, yeah! I will let this out about the leading-to-the-climax-stuff: best action sequences I think I have ever seen, ever. EVER. Also, this movie has the best and most realistically effective uses of CGI I have ever seen. I mean, once the movie started rolling, I even forgot I was watching CGI.

What’s even better is that it’s story is fantastic and captivating. It’s got the truest kind of racism (the kind against other species and, eventually, ourselves), fear, anger, violence, lying, explosions, robots, biogenetic technology, flying ships, African war lords, government intervention, love for family and love for a race/species, mutation, development, change, metamorphosis, and each portrayed by it’s own character and all portrayed within a seamless, constant mood.

By mood, I mean that the look and feel of the movie never changes from one scene to the next. It always has aspects of dirty, dingy and diseased, but it becomes progressively more apparent. It has everything I want in a movie about the dirty truth of how horrible humans are on a base level. It’s the kind of mood I expect from zombie films and the like, but that has never been done correctly, until now. And it wasn’t even done with zombies or vampires or anything else you might fancy; it was done with something as jaded as aliens from outter space!

There really is a lot more to say about this movie than I thought I was going to and than I will say, now. Just… just go see it and decide for yourself if you like it or not. As for me, best movie this year.