District 9

Scoring a 91% on the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes and 81 on Metacritic, District 9 is an award-winning science fiction motion picture thriller that was nominated for 4 Oscars for editing, visual effects, screenplay and the best motion picture of the year award.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/awardshttp://www.metacritic.com/movie/district-9<ref><ref>http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/district_9/ Released in August 2009, the film was directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham. The screenplay was crafted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.

District 9 was based on a 2005 short film by Blomkamp called Alive in Joburg, which was inspired by the inner-city neighborhood of District Six in Cape Town.http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/district-9-20090813 The primary filming locations for the movie include Johannesburg, South Africa and New Zealand. With an estimated $30 million budget, the film grossed over $115 million in the United States.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/locations

Aliens arrive and hover over Johannesburg, South Africa for three months starting in March of 1992. The aliens are nicknamed "prawns" due to their vague physical resemblance to shrimp. After humans cut into the ship, a group of sick aliens are discovered that have escaped their dying planet. They are offered refuge on Earth, but are housed in a militarized zone known as District 9. They are intentionally segregated from humans, as they are believed to be violent and prone to criminal behavior.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/synopsis

After 28 years of living on Earth, the aliens have over-extended their welcome and the population in Johannesburg no longer wants the camp to be housed in their city. The Multi-National United company is assigned the task of evicting the population of the ghetto-like camps and resettling all of the aliens in a new area. During the eviction process, the on-location manager is exposed to an alien chemical that ultimately causes him to seek help with the aliens he was trying to evict.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/plotsummary

• Sharlto Copley as Wikus Van De Merwe
• Jason Cope as Christopher Johnson
• William Allen Young as Dirk Michaels
• Vanessa Haywood as Tania Van De Merwe
• Nathalie Boltt as Sarah Livingstone
• Robert Hobbs as Ross Pienaarhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/fullcredits#cast

"District 9 does a lot of things right, including giving us aliens to remind us not everyone who comes in a spaceship need be angelic, octopod or stainless steel. They are certainly alien, all right. It is also a seamless merger of the mockumentary and special effects (the aliens are CGI). And there’s a harsh parable here about the alienation and treatment of refugees.."—Roger Eberthttp://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090812/REVIEWS/908129987

"At its core the film tells the story — hardly an unfamiliar one in the literature of modern South Africa — of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes aware of the injustice that keeps him in his place and the others, his designated inferiors, in theirs. The cost he pays for this knowledge is severe, as it must be, given the dreadful contours of the system. But if the film’s view of the world is bleak, it is not quite nihilistic. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated."—The New York Timeshttp://movies.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/movies/14district.html

"District 9, with a chump-change budget of $30 million, soars on the imagination of its creators. This baby has the stuff to end the movie summer on a note of dazzle and distinction."—RollingStonehttp://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/district-9-20090813