Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a minor miracle: At $30 million, it proves that you can make a visually exciting, tense, action-packed science fiction movie that looks good, sounds good, is well acted, and blows things up without resorting to product tie-ins, ADHD editing, liberal amounts of slo-mo, or camera tricks that smack of television commercials. District 9 is the anti-Transformers: Popcorn space opera with a smart, hard sci-fi shell.
I’ll be frank and say that the hard sci-fi aspects come to a screeching halt around midway through the movie, but until that point, what we have is fascinating. An alien craft comes to hover above Johannesburg, South Africa, eschewing the usual landing spots of Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Moscow. After much deliberation, humans bore into the mothership and make a shocking discovery: A horde of writhing, malnourished extraterrestrials who look a bit like Abe from the awesome-but-somewhat-forgotten Oddworld video games, if Abe had tentacles and mandibles.
Or maybe not, but I wanted to be clever and obscure. Clever obscura?
Having had no experience with aliens who don’t look like us, look like angels, look like stuffed animals, speak our language, blow up our landmarks, or come preaching peace (…or else!), humanity decides to do what it can: Temporarily house them in District 9. Temporary becomes 20 years, long enough for D9 to become a shanty town whose inhabitants pick at garbage heaps for scrap and treat cat food like a five star delicacy. Humanity, expecting more from a race of beings who have mastered interstellar travel, want the aliens out. Multinational United, an organization dedicated to philanthropy, private security, and weapons manufacturing, are ready, willing, and able to make this happen – the Prawns will be evicted and moved to District 10.
There’s a lot of corporate whitewash and “what can you do?” all over this, like the guys at the top of the multimillion dollar corporation really wanted to help but just couldn’t for whatever reason, which just so happens to be a haul of alien weaponry that blows the doors off of human tech but requires the bio-signature of a Prawn to work. MNU can confiscate all the weapons it wants from District 9, but confiscation is about all they can do.
Which isn’t to say that they’re not on the lookout for some sort of skeleton key, which is likely why they’re keen on serving eviction notices. The man in charge of this operation, Wikus van de Merwe (an awesome, previously unknown Sharlto Copley), videotapes the grisly proceedings, like a soldier at Abu Garib who assumes that the film will never fall out of his hands. Caught on tape, van de Merwe’s condescending behavior towards Prawns, eviction notices signed at shotgun-point, violence, a mafia element, souvenir-taking, and abortion. Wikus has a grin on his face through all of it, unless he’s made to look like a fool, which happens quite often, like when he inspects a strange canister that crackles like a Geiger counter and it sprays out a viscus black liquid that was previously seen being cooked on a home chemistry set. Is this some sort of alien meth? Hardly, but poor Van De Merwe reacts poorly to it, throwing up. Later, his arm is broken. Then he has a sort of odd nosebleed. He goes home to his wife after this awful day, only to stumble into a surprise party celebrating his promotion. He throws up all over the cake. He heads to the hospital. He becomes an extremely valuable medical experiment; Gregor Samsa with a bounty on his head.
This, basically, is where the movie stops being an allegory and starts being a chase thriller. Blomkamp could very well have stuck with the docudrama feel, giving us glimpses into Wikus metamorphosis and a treatise on human nature, and I still would have liked it. Instead, he creates an incredibly paced, tightly narrated chase through the slums, where van de Merwe is targeted by both MNU and a Nigerian gang that wants to eat his arm, believing that it will grant them the ability to wield their stockpile of alien weaponry that is otherwise scrap. Acting as van de Merwe’s accomplices are two Prawns, Christopher Joseph and his son, who has cute, big, wet googly eyes that had one of the girls I went to see the movie with cooing about how adorable the little guy was, like Wall-E with tentacles.
As it turns out, Christopher Joseph is not a scrounger. He and his son are two of maybe three intelligent Prawns who are seen in the movie, and it is he who cooks up the black fluid, which isn’t a virus but a fuel of some kind. He also says that he can cure Wikus. “I knew you Prawns were intelligent!” he says, more relieved that he won’t have to become one than pleasantly surprised at his “discovery.”
I have a theory about Christopher Joseph: He isn’t the only smart Prawn in District 9. Sure, what we see of the Prawns before he becomes the central one isn’t a pretty picture. They riot, they pick garbage, they enjoy catfood, and they’re apparently stupid, completely failing to meet our expectations as to what a visiting species would be, looks aside. But where do all of our images of Prawns come from before Wikus unknowingly stumbles into Christopher Joseph’s shack? The documentary footage of Wikus’ journey into the camp, and news footage. Consider the state of the news media, then ask what the sexier headline is: “Are Aliens Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” or “Aliens Land; Ask for Directions to Alpha Centauri.” We see what we want to see, and after 20 years of seeing an alien craft hovering and rusting above a major metropolis, many of us would stop seeing an intelligent race with the ability to travel throughout the galaxy, preferring instead to think that, back home, the Prawns pick through garbage heaps for food, hoping for a scrap that tastes like Fancy Feast. This is why people who go to Sea World don’t see dolphins as incredibly smart creatures, but as constantly smiling dopes who are happy to do back flips for minnows. In the D9 time line, Earth has been given 20 years to think that the Prawns are dumb, violent, bumbling creatures. We create stereotypes, then give their subjects no choice but to live within it. I don’t know what that’s worth coming from a white college kid, so take it for what you will.
On the other hand, the Nigerian gang who are shown selling cat food, other meat, and sex to Prawns for guns and money are one dimensional, meant to intimidate, rather than educate. They eat Prawn parts to gain their power, adhere to voodoo, and do little more than leer, yell, and shoot things. There aren’t many positive black figures in the movie (the only one I can really think of has an extremely minor part), but it wasn’t exactly like Blomkamp went out of his way to make Wikus the world’s most likable white man, either. I don’t want to accuse anybody of nitpicking, but what does it say when we complain that the secondary villains, who are there basically as deus ex machina/cannon fodder, aren’t well developed? Not every white man acting as VP of some division in a weapons manufacturing company is an ethics-skirting asshole in a power suit, but I don’t see too many people coming out of the woodwork to suggest that Blomkamp’s portrayal of the 21st century business man was less than fair to the 21st century business man. Suggesting that this is how the movie sees all Africans (Nigerians, at least) as violent, ill-tempered, voodoo warriors is like suggesting that Silence of the Lambs sees all MTF transsexuals as knife-wielding, dungeon-digging, skin care obsessed psychopaths, and Silence didn’t even give the courtesy of having a nice transsexual somewhere in the background.
If anything, the film’s fatal flaw was its third act, a shootout that was exciting but that added nothing in terms of message. I won’t go so far as to call it a cop-out, but the film leaves things very much up in the air, not wanting to answer any of its own questions or follow up with the Prawns, who are moved into District 10, described by Wikus as being like concentration camps, via title card. I was glad for the shootout, not wanting to be lectured after a breathless second act, but yeah, it was a wee bit thin, and leaves us with enough uncertainty that a follow-up would be awfully convenient for all involved; which I actually wouldn’t mind, providing that it focused on the slums and the Prawns more than MNU and weapons. There’s room enough for an effective political statement, but 33 years after apartheid, a lecture smacks of apology, which, as an Irishman, I didn’t want from Gangs of New York, either. This isn’t a movie about racism, but it doesn’t use the allegory as a mere prop, either.
Probably the best movie of it’s kind since Total Recall. If you know anything about me, you know that’s extremely high praise.
The Dude Abides
I definitely agree with your point about the intelligence of the prawns. If a bunch of humans took a aircraft carrier to some deserted island, how many of us would be able to fix it when it broke?
The Nigerians are definitely portrayed awfully, but so is pretty much everyone else in the movie. The prawns (who are the people we feel bad for), every white person in the movie, the black South Africans… everyone with the exception of Christopher Johnson, his son and Wikus' assistant (who happens to be black).
Right. I think I tried to make that point, but I might have made it poorly, or at a different website entirely. There aren't many people who would willingly move into a slum full of awful looking aliens. Those who do must have some sort of ulterior motive. 99.99 percent of the time, it ain't going to be humanitarian.
I didn't want to mention Wikus' assistant, as that might have been considered a spoiler. The poor guy is called "boy" the whole time.
this movie was awesome. i though that it was such a fresh, new movie theater experience that i actually felt proud to be able to say that i saw it. like, it was that good to me.