A fun, but rather abrasive film about aliens living in apartheid in Johannesburg, South Africa and an awkward bureaucrat caught in between two worlds. The overall premise of this film is fairly decent and the idea of someone slowly falling into another world is not an original concept, but in the hands of the right actor-- it can always look fresh. I think this film’s lead actor Sharlto Copley does a remarkable job for a guy who has only acted in a couple other smaller projects before this. I was surprised to learn that most of the documentary-esque scenes where he interrogated "prawns" in this film were ad-libbed.
That’s pretty impressive, and the fact that he has to go through this rather grotesque physical transformation with lots added pounds of make-up (and occasional help with CGI), but still continue a believably factor is commendable. He is, to me, the single most successful thing in the whole film because if he couldn’t have pulled it off-- the whole movie would have caved in on itself. The creators of this film seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from video games (ala getting their kicks out of watching bad guys explode into bloody water balloons) and certain amount of absurd comic books. And sadly, I wish the film was less about that kind of "boys with toys" entertainment and a little more about Sharlto Copley’s life before his accident.
I felt like I really wanted to know more about his relationship to his wife, which is obviously his character’s whole motivation for trying to stay alive and become human again. I also wanted to know why Copley’s father-in-law dislikes him so. It would have been nice if this film delved a little more into the human element as well as stay serious in its themes about apartheid, but again most of this film’s saving grace is this Wikus Van De Merwe character and how he thrives to stay alive, try to make conversation with the aliens, and attempt to bridge the gap between two "races." --let’s not forget the splatter!