District 9

dir: Neill Blomkamp

2009

It seems like a brilliant idea on paper. It even seemed like a brilliant idea in the promos and trailers and such. Truth be told it was the first genuine-seeming actual science fiction movie to pique my interest in a long time.

As the film begins, the premise is set out for us very quickly and easily. Twenty years ago, a huge alien vessel appeared above the skies of Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens, for which we are never given a better title than prawns, are settled into a ghetto / township, all million plus of them.

The ghetto is cordoned off, and twenty years later, as an impetus to the current story we’re supposed to be watching, the organisation tasked with corralling the prawns decides it needs to move the prawns 200 kilometres away because of tensions with the locals. Mostly because South Africans, white or black, don’t want them there. They are seen, despite their hideous appearance, as really being nothing more annoying or dangerous than refugees.

The prawns live in squalor and filth, and though they are reasonably intelligent and can communicate via some kind of clicking - grunting language, they can’t seem to do anything more complicated than rip open a can of cat food and gorge on it. This leads commentators to believe that the stranded aliens are some low order of drone within some insect-like hierarchy species.

How do I know that ‘commentators’ and academics have these opinions? Well, because the film spends an idiotic length of time devoted to talking heads talking about stuff as if they’re helping us out with a complex topic. Instead of illuminating what’s going on, these heads either repeat something we’ve already seen or foreshadow something that’s coming.

That organisation tasked with controlling the prawns, called MNU, which is an amalgam of the UN and some kind of omni-transnational corporation which runs almost everything, is at least at first represented by the genial, goofy Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a bureaucrat with a heart of papery gold. He is given the job of organising the eviction, which, surprisingly enough, is not going to go smoothly.

What’s funny about these early scenes is that despite the strangeness of the premise, the effecting of bureaucratic outcomes seems oddly comforting. Thus follow scenes where Wikus and his staff go door to door in the township trying to get prawns to sign paperwork that indicates they understand and agree to be evicted in the following days over to the concentration camp that will be District 10. It’s insane, but it works specifically because it’s not supposed to work. We realise early on that he’s supposed to fail.

Just for you history buffs out there, all this ‘district’ stuff is an explicit reference to District 6, a ghetto that was rezoned as a ‘whites only’ area, prompting forced deportations of around 60,000 people who weren’t presumably white to Cape Flats, twenty five kilometres away. This really happened back in the 1960s. Now, even the dumbest person watching probably figures that, being set in South Africa, this is probably the least subtle allegory in the history of science fiction allegories, seeing as such a setting with such complex racial relations must be thematically ripe for cinematic treatment in this way.

The things is, what’s funniest to me, is that South Africa itself, as it is today in reality, is a far more alien place than any fictional representation of it, here or anywhere else. Trying to figure out that Afrikaans accent, and trying to figure out just how the English South Africans, the Afrikaans South Africans and the African South Africans relate and tolerate each other is far more complicated and perplexing to me than how they all react to the presence of millions of insectoid aliens.

Wikus (pronounced Vick-us), for all his geniality and boyishness, is still a bureaucratic functionary, and a pretty naïve one at that. He leads the task force into the zone blithely ignorant as to the shitstorm that will result when a quasi-government-corporate body tries to forcibly move a million belligerent creatures. Watching him initially interacting with the residents of District 9 is like watching a child juggling a working chainsaw and a car tire that’s also on fire.

Try as you might, you just can’t look away. Though early on we are given an impression that the prawns are pretty dumb and brutish, we see two of them at least conferring about a plan of theirs coming to fruition if only they can secure some more of something. That something is a crucial but unexplained maguffin that instigates everything in the movie, but in classic maguffin style, we never find out what it is, exactly.

We do get to see, however, what it can do.

The intelligent prawns hide the canister containing full-strength maguffin juice, which of course is stumbled upon by Wikus in his search for weapons. See, one of the lingering curiousities surrounding the prawns is the fact that they have brought with them nothing except these amazing weapons that only the prawns can use. MNU security personnel keep confiscating these weapons, which the prawns never use to bust out of District 9 en masse, but do give to evil Nigerian gangsters in trade for cans of cat food. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the weapons, ranging from handguns that make their targets explode, to fully mobile battle armoured suits, look like something out of a videogame. In fact, many of them look suspiciously like they’re out of the Halo series of games, which again is no coincidence, since Peter Jackson had tapped Neill Blomkamp to direct a Halo flick that never fortunately came to fruition.

Well, someone’s excited about the prospect of using these weapons. Not Wikus, though, who has some profound problems of his own to now deal with after being exposed to the maguffin prawn juice.

Without giving too much away, Wikus transforms from being a happy-go-lucky nebbish into being someone pursued by everyone in South Africa mostly for nefarious ends. He desperately searches for a solution to his problems, which eventually leads him to somewhat befriend the only one of the prawns who sticks around long enough to make an impression, having the improbable name of Christopher Johnson.

Of Christopher’s motivations and intentions, we know and learn nothing, although he does seem keen to get back to the mothership which looms perpetually over the Johannesburg skyline. When Wikus’s problem comes glaringly to the fore, Christopher implies that he could help him if only they can get to the mothership with the canister of maguffin juice.

You’d think this’d be a relatively straightforward task, but no-one else shares their enthusiasm. In fact, the entirety of Johannesburg seems to be trying to stop them. The leader of MNU’s special forces unit, - 1st Battalion - has especially taken a strong dislike to Wikus and intends to terminate him with extreme prejudice. That blue-eyed Afrikaaner is a scary motherfucker, way scarier than the aliens. To top things off, the leader of the Nigerians preying on the prawns, wheelchair-bound but still deadly, wants to eat Wikus in order to somehow absorb his new, um, abilities. I tell you, it’s a nightmare when everyone wants a piece of you.

I guess it’s handy for Wikus that, despite not being a soldier, he has access to a whole new arsenal of fantastic weapons, which eventually leads to the kinds of confrontations action movie-loving nerds are supposed to salivate over. The second half of the film is very much a full on action fest that builds and builds in terms of intensity and it supposed to be a well-earned payoff for our patience.

I’m not sure that it worked so much for me. I guess perhaps the intention was to get us to care about Wikus and his predicament before circumstance forces him into the action-hero mould, and it kinda works, mostly because Wikus is likable to an extent, even with his high-pitched whiney voice. But the plot kinda falls apart and wanders on for no real reason except for the fact that they feel the need for another protracted action scene. That the film could have ended half an hour earlier with the same outcome is not something I can ignore.

I call it the Isla De La Muerta mistake, named after the inexplicable need the makers of the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick felt that compelled them to take the story to what seemed like the climax at said location, only to wander off for another forty minutes pointlessly, only to return to the same fucking location for the ending that could just have easily happened the first time around.

I don’t expect the phrase to gain currency in the film criticism world, but it sticks out for me. I don’t think it’s a bad film: far from it, I just don’t think it’s great. I don’t know if it matters, really. It’s such a great idea that I appreciate it more than it probably deserves, even knowing that the end result is probably not as strong as it could have been. Whilst the effects representing the prawns are fantastic, I have lingering problems with how their species is represented within the story. They’re less a metaphor for black South Africans living under apartheid, and more a plot device that knows its limited place. These guys aren’t agitating for freedom, or for their rights as sentient, self-aware and intelligent beings: they just want some cat food.

All except for Christopher and his son, who seem to have some grander plan, one which is obscured from us, even past the film’s end. Maybe an inevitable sequel, being called District 10, will clear things up, although in the wrong hands it’ll probably just degenerate into an Independence Day rip-off.

Something should, I guess, be said about how the flick looks, as in it’s meant to look like a pseudo-documentary with found footage (from handheld cameras, security cameras and the like), and talking head / interview footage spliced in as if it’s a program for airing during a current affairs broadcast. Of course comparisons with Blair Witch, Cloverfield and, to a lesser extent, Children of Men are inevitable. It’s inconsistently applied, and, truth be told it’s pretty distracting.

The editing seems to have been set on the Michael Bay setting in certain parts, and the overblown soundtrack sounds like it was composed by Jerry Bruckheimer himself. Of course, no-one needs to tell me that Bruckheimer doesn’t compose film scores, but you can tell the second you’re watching any flick he’s involved with from the head-pounding, overdone soundtracks.

It also is less than useless to have the fake talking heads commenting on stuff that’s just happened or is about to happen to the protagonist. I’m happy to have them explain the history of the prawn’s arrival, and the descriptions of their living conditions and the overall context or frame for the story. However. A quick note to both prospective filmmakers and accomplished ones like the protégés of big swinging dicks on the cinematic block like Peter Jackson: we don’t need a fucking commentator commentating on something if all they’re going to do is repeat exactly what happened. It’s the worst, laziest and most cowardly of cinematic devices, and it shows a lack of confidence in your own flick. Fifty per cent of those worthless pseudo-interviews, where give us nuggets of wisdom as important as “No-one expected Wikus to do what he did then, or why” or “Who’d have thought that what was about to happen would happen?” could have been easily excised without harming the flick at all. It’s almost but not quite self-parody, and at the very least it makes you wish the robots from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 could be resurrected in order to tear those parts of the flick apart.

You know who might have expected what happened to happen? The goddamn audience, Neill and Peter. Any audience not dumb enough to understand a plot this simple is going to be too busy buggering livestock or buying lottery tickets to even understand your goddamn synopsis commentaries, ya lily-livered yellow bellies.

I didn’t hate it, but I can’t say that I utterly loved it either. Something about the action scenes didn’t work for me, but the overall aesthetic of the flick, and the strange story appeal to me despite the flick’s limitations and determination to eventually follow an action-y path that the earlier plot would lead you to think wasn’t going to be obligatory. When it’s dealing with the concept of just what the world would do if there was a visitation of this kind, it’s interesting even if it seems mundane, to think about the logistics of housing and containing a million aliens of murky dispositions and intentions. When it reduces everything, ultimately, to explosions of CGI body parts, it’s less engaging and less affecting.

It’s an interesting idea. Maybe it’ll grow on me with time. We shall see.

If we have enough time, that is.

7 times it seems awfully convenient that the maguffin juice could do everything that this flick required, making the word ‘alien’ synonymous with ‘magical’, out of 10

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“Could you go a bit slower with the clicks there, it sounded like you said ‘three years’” – time is relative, after all - District 9