This is, perhaps, one of the most sensitive and tender sci-fi movie I have ever seen. To use all of those words in the same sentence seems quite odd; don't get me wrong. There are plenty of aliens, heavy artilery, space ships and neato special effects to qualify the use of the word sci-fi. However, it's the relationship between one of the aliens and a unique hero that makes it indeed touching.
It begins like a regular documentary film. An alien spaceship landed, well hovered, over Johannesburg, South Africa for three months until humans were sent to cut into the ship, where they found sick aliens, presumably workers not leaders, and they were promptly brought down and set up in camps which quickly turned into crime infested ghettos. After the polish wore off, the aliens were referred to as prawns, a derogatory comment to their looks and not treated with the utmost respect. Here begins out story.
Meet Wikus van der Merwe (a brilliant Sharlto Copley), a worker bee for the private company hired to move the prawns to new housing and the prawns don't want to go. In the process, Wikus gets accidentally sprayed with one of the prawn's mysterious liquids and within hours he is starting to morph into one of them. Wikus battles with the transformation and turns ruthless to do what he must to stop the process. Along the way, he grows balls and opens his heart. He befriends one of the prawns, Christopher Johnson, who has a small son and shows more knowledge than the other prawns. At first the only thing Wikus wants is to cure himself but then he sees the big picture, accepts his fate and works for the greater good.
There are many outstanding things about this film. One big one is the acting done by Copley. Born in Johannesburg, he is relatively unknown but competes with the likes of Christian Bale or any other top action star. What he possesses is the naïveté and wild eyed wonder at what's going on around him in a most believable fashion. Perhaps Hollywood hasn't chewed up his soul for lunch yet, but until they do, watch anything this guy does; hesitant to say as his next project is the A-Team remake. The second is the way the prawns communicate with the humans and we are given one of two words captioned on the screen but yet no meaning is lost. It isn't like one of those situations where the human says, "Oh so you are angry and want to return to your ship?" Somehow with body language and the flow of the human's reactions, it just works. Try to see another foreign language movie do that.
BIG bite: An excellent film and one I highly recommend. First class work all the way around.
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