Again, ranking movies feels weird to me, I can make a pretty good case to myself that I like all the other movies I've talked about more than this one, but I can also make a case (as I believe I'm already doing) that the opposite is true.
#4: District 9
In the same way that one can call The Road "realistic," District 9 achieves a similar distinction. While nobody knows what it would exactly, actually be like if a spaceship of sickly aliens found themselves ostensibly shipwrecked on Earth, it sure seems like it would go something like District 9 imagines it.
However, once we realize where they have shipwrecked, we begin to understand the trouble with allegories. The aliens didn't come to New York or London, they picked Johannesburg. And so, naturally, everyone immediately decides that District 9 is an allegory for apartheid which, in many respects, is true. But to make too much of the setting and to fixate on the "alien segregation as apartheid" idea is to not only undersell District 9 but to undersell the ANC, Mandela, Biko, etc. That isn't the story of D9, and to pretend it is doesn't pay the appropriate respect to the real South African freedom fighters. While there are clear parallels between apartheid and the alien segregation (forced relocation, linguistic subjugation, etc.) to try and extrapolate anymore only makes the allegory weaker. What District 9 is really about is fearing what we don't understand, and then being forced to understand it.
District 9, without a doubt in my opinion, had the best twist of any movie this year. The trailers and the short-film the movie is based on (director Neill Blomkamp's Alive in Joburg) don't give away the true focus and, as it needs to be experienced for the full effectiveness, I'll refrain from revealing the surprising thrust of the story. What I will say about the twist is that, once it occurs, it transfers the specific themes that many viewers were analyzing (e.g. apartheid, corporate greed) to a much larger, universal theme of (among other things) identity, that can be examined to the extreme only in the sci-fi genre.
What makes D9 so great is that it manages to meld these specific themes (which certainly don't evaporate post-twist), with a grander one, while presenting it in the context of an adventurous, exciting, action-packed film. In general, action/adventure is rarely enough to get me to the theater without some promise of something more meaningful. So, while I welcome the adrenalized sequences of D9, they're not why I like the movie. However, as I'm sure many people did, one can enjoy the film strictly on this Transformers-type level and ignore the philosophical aspects. As such, I probably would have liked it even more had the ratio been tilted slightly more toward the intellectual elements of the film. D9 certainly presents plenty of ideas to consider and discuss, but it could have spent a little more time with them on screen.
But, at it's core, D9 is still a character drama. Everything depends on us feeling for the lead, Wikus van de Merwe (played by Blomkamp friend Sharlto Copley). Our engagement to him is slow, he comes off as out-of-touch and punctilious at first, but when the twist occurs, the budding sympathies we felt for him do well to yank us all the way into his predicament. While a few of the other characters are nearly of Avatar-level* convention, the believability of the world they exist in and the logical, developed hatred that a human might have for these intrusive aliens, make their motivations work. That said, some of the personalities (of both the aliens and the humans) occasionally border on silly, which can serve to break, or at least crack, the illusion.
* And there are a lot of comparisons one could make between the two films.
Nevertheless, D9 does an outstanding job blending the real with the unreal (much of the film is in a documentary style). Even though the premise is far-fetched, as are some of the alien characteristics, the execution of these ideas is precise enough that, so long as we accept the conditions/rules of the film, it won't disappoint or confuse us later. Blomkamp has expressed interest in a sequel/prequel and [POSSIBLE QUASI-SPOILER ALERT] in my opinion, this story won't be complete without one. [END PQSA] District 9 manages to pack a lot into one movie, and chances are that most people will find something to enjoy about it. I certainly did.
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