- Directed by Neill Blomkamp
- Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
- Starring
- Sharlto Copley
- Jason Cope
- Nathalie Boltt
- Sylvaine Strike
- Elizabeth Mkandawie
- Produced by Carolynne Cunningham and Peter Jackson
District 9 is the Susan Boyle of the 2009 movie crop. Who would have expected that an independent science fiction film (a well-funded one, granted, with Peter Jackson on board as a producer) from South Africa would be so well-executed, both creatively and technically? Based on shortened expectations and the fact that the last South African movie most people had seen was one of those The Gods Must Be Crazy films, the rave reviews started pouring in. Now, Susan Boyle has a perfectly fine voice, but if her appearance hadn’t preceded her — that of a dumpy woman with unkempt eyebrows — then the contrast between sight and sound wouldn’t have prompted the amazed reaction that it did. Had District 9 not come from South Africa, its nigh-perfect design and CGI work would have gotten approving nods, not standing ovations.
Not that District 9 could have been made anywhere else. You see, it’s about apartheid. That’s the subtext, but the subtext is worn on the surface so that any viewer anywhere in the world can “discover” that it’s about apartheid and feel proud of themselves for discovering it, even though it’s about as hard to discover as the big red X in this sentence. And while there are clever and moving and just plain well-executed scenes throughout the movie, they’re balanced by scenes which prompt you to say, “Yes, we get it already!”
Our representative of humanity.
As blatant as it seems to the rest of the Western world, it must have been unbearably self-righteous to South Africans, as they would pick up on so many more pointed details — right down to the name of the feature, which echoes the real-life “District Six” area of Capetown, whose inhabitants (black, naturally) were forcibly relocated in the 1970’s. I can’t think of an American-made movie which would have seemed nearly so preachy to a domestic audience; compared to this, Al Gore’s loudest bloviatings on climate change seem like the sheerest accidental penumbra of social conscience. Maybe Afrikaners like being preached to more than Americans.
Oh, what’s it about? Here’s the premise: A gargantuan spaceship appeared in the sky above Johannesburg in 1982, and hovered there motionless for so long that finally the government gets impatient and breaks in. Inside, the find a population of vaguely humanoid insect-like aliens, leaderless and malnourished. The aliens, quickly dubbed “prawns,” were brought down to Earth as a “humanitarian” relief effort, but thanks to human xenophobia and prejudice they ended up confined solely to District 9, a settlement camp that soon became a filthy and hopeless shantytown/slum.
“And now your weather forecast. Scattered showers today, except in the downtown area, because, you know…”
All of that is background, presented to us in convincing faux-documentary format. The present-day subject of said documentary is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), mid-level functionary at Multi-National United, the private contractor company to which administration and control of the prawns had been delegated by the government. Wikus is a vaguely competent but clueless sort, and his recent promotion in the company has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that his father-in-law is highly placed at MNU.
And what does this promotion entail? Wikus is to spearhead the movement of the inhabitants of District 9 to a new resettlement camp, far enough from Johannesburg that the locals can put the prawns out of their mind. Backed by precision mercenary teams, Wikus’ job is essentially that of an eviction agent for over a million disenfranchised aliens.
“‘Assume the position’? Which position is that?”
Naturally, there are insidious forces at work. MNU isn’t just a mercenary contractor; as one of the biggest weapons developers in the world (and thus EE-vil, as if you have to ask), they’re also keen to unlock the secrets of prawn weaponry; unfortunately, that bit of tech is attuned only to the aliens’ bio-signatures and is useless to humans. But when Wikus stumbles across a cobbled-together prawn biotech lab and is exposed to something which makes him a little less human and a little more prawn, he finds that his munificent employer, not to mention loving Dad-in-Law, is more than willing to dehumanize Wikus just as much as Wikus has dehumanized the prawns.
This is one of those movies which demonstrates that CGI, a loathsome crutch in the hands of a Hollywood hack, can demolish the limits of possibility in the hands of a gifted director. The prawns are realized almost entirely by computer, but one is hard-pressed to see a flaw in the design or execution of them, and it’s hard to remember that Copley and other humans aren’t acting opposite seven-foot-tall chitinous creatures with squiggly mouth tentacles and mandibles. That’s especially impressive as 95% of the movie was shot with hand-held cameras or a reasonable facsimile thereof, yet the prawns seem believably real and solid. The cinema verite angle to the production, the conceit that we’re seeing a documentary about the District 9 relocation, eventually breaks down; at first, Wikus and other participants are addressing the camera and interacting with its operator, but in one jarring scene we’re given information that no camera would be around for, and by the end the documentary angle has been all but jettisoned, though the handcam cinematography (not shakycam) is kept.
Why am I suddenly thinking of cocktail sauce?
The end product is a very good science fiction film, and it could have been a great one if it hadn’t kept hitting the audience over the head with hammers labeled “metaphor” and “allegory.” In the hours immediately following a viewing, one comes to realize exactly how many story elements were engineered to the point of contrivance so that District 9 could be an apartheid parallel. There’s no discussion of exploring and examining the alien ship, of finding out from the aliens why they’re here or where they come from. The inclusion of alien weapons seems forced; if it’s common for these downtrodden prawns to have fantastic firepower, why do they never use it? There’s no mention of a United Nations presence in any of this, nor is there any mention of other countries hosting prawn communities, though you know that alien contact would be strongly contested as “something that belongs to all of us.”
But what’s really striking is that the prawns are portrayed as essentially human, despite their outward appearance (and thus the billions of years of alien evolution that went into making them). Despite being insectlike, they’re not in the least hive-minded; the squatter shacks they build are not only for two- or three-individual “families,” but they look exactly like the tarpaper hovels that destitute humans build (because they were actual human hovels used for filming). Wikus builds a grudging relationship with a prawn called “Christopher Johnson” (yes, colonialism, we get it), who has a juvenile son whom Christopher treats just like a human parent treats a child, despite the many other more common parenting styles on display in the natural world. Even the prawn language, which consists of wet sounds punctuated by African-sounding pops and stops, is comprehensible enough to human minds that Wikus and most of the other humans in the movie can understand it without trouble, even if they can’t wrap their tongues around it. It was necessary for the apartheid parallel that the prawns be “human” on the inside, despite their alien appearance, to the point that their physiognomy is just window dressing for a terribly unlikely humanlike psychology.
Not only is he the fugitive, he’s also the one-armed man! Sort of. (You’d get it if you’d seen the movie.)
Focusing on the flaws and disappointments at the end of the review makes it sound like I didn’t like District 9. On the contrary, I thought it probably the best science fiction movie of the past several years. I just wish I came out of it without the bruises from being hit over the head repeatedly with metaphoric hammers.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 42 (yes, counting prawns)
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 13
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
Hi Nathan,
As a born and bred South African I must just make the following remarks:
a.) I think that, yes, the movie can be a metaphor for apartheid – amongst other things. I think however it was more inspired by recent xenophobic attacks by South Africans on illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Africa in particular Zimbabwe. So it’s more sophisticated than a mere apartheid metaphor although having met Blomkamp I believe that he probably had Alien Nation (the movie) in mind than scoring political points.
b.) District 6 was actually a so-called “colored” – or people of mixed race – neighborhood, not a Black one. What’s the difference? Under apartheid so-called “coloreds” weren’t White enough, but under the current government they are sadly not Black enough . . .
Apartheid may be dead, but unfortunately race and ethnicity is as important as ever in this country I’m afraid.
- James
So race doesn’t cease to be an issue as soon as you elect your first black president? Amazing!
.
I was going to say that my South African neighbor was blown away by the film and wasn’t sure everyone else could appreciate it quite as much, but since you have a real South African here already, I guess I just won’t say anything…..
I saw it on the big screen and i enjoyed the hell out of it. Not because of how little money it was made for but because it was everything it claimed to be – a smart little sci-fi film that was full of action. the guy from 1001 Misspent Hours compared it to Paul Verhoven’s style of social commentary/action, which is pretty accurate
as for the hive thing – apparently ‘Christopher’ was evolving into the Leader role that was unoccupied for the years that the aliens had been on earth. or something
Or something. And if his personality/role were in a state of flux, his constant exposure to humans for two decades might have made him especially humanlike in his attitudes (as seen in his relationship with his son).
I have to tell you, it always makes me uneasy when fans have to add a lot of “scaffolding” to make something work.
Granted, I must admit after I was out of the theater and my mind began to clear from the fast-paced, top-notch executed action sequences I also thought “That’s a highly contrived plot, actually.”
Making things worse was the appearance of ye olde sci-fi trope “human protagonist turns into alien”… Yeah, I get it, we may look different, but aside from that we’re alike and yadda yadda. (By the way, isn’t it somewhat nonsensical that rocket fuel is supposed to be capable of something like that?) There was a scene with a throw-away line stating the relocation is overseen by UN forces (apparently consisting of just five men), but one has to wonder what nation in existance would give a private company charge over an entire community of aliens. Even if they’re indeed just unskilled worker “drones” lacking intricate knowledge of the exact scientific principals their technology is based on, I’m quite sure the world powers in the middle of the Cold War would had seized as much as possible in the hope to get at least some useful information from them, Operation Paperclip style.
On the other hand, Wikus driving (wearing?) a heavily armed mecha to fight a whole squad of mercs made one almost forget this. Let’s hope the sequel will be an equally good film.
I really don’t see how a sequel could be any good; it would basically be a rehash of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes with mecha suits. I’m happy to be proven wrong, of course.
The stuff about the absence of leadership and Christopher evolving to fill that role comes from interviews with Blomkamp rather than “fanwank”, but yes, it would have been nice to have that clarified a little more in the movie itself. But I do think it’s clear that the prawns have adopted human personalities as a result of having been around humans for so long–they apparently started out as essentially mindless, and have slowly been changing in response to a social vacuum, so it more or less makes sense that a drone culture would shape itself to look like the nearest model.
(SPOILERS)
And yeah, that “rocket fuel causes alien transformation” bit is headsmackingly dumb and seriously damages the film. Talk about phlebotinum. I’ll tell you what my first thought was, on seeing that plot point: I thought that Christopher was trying to scrape together the alien equivalent of royal jelly and breed a new queen/general/brain bug/whatever. That would have made Wikus’s transformation make a whole lot more sense, and would even have been thematically powerful–he could have become sort of a messiah figure and helped bridge the gap between the two cultures.
Random side note: the name “van der Merwe” is apparently a punchline in South Africa, the butt of a series of jokes. It’s sort of like if an American director ha called his lead characters “Goofus” and “Gallant” or “Mutt” and “Jeff”.
There are a couple of words missing in the first paragraph: “the contrast between sight and sound would not have prompted the amazed reaction that it (did). (Had) District 9 …” Interestingly, although D9 is a South African film, the special effects were done here in Vancouver B.C. Canada, since you can get champagne effects on a beer budget here. Thirty million dollars being a small budget these days, apparently.
My fingers simply can’t keep up with my supersonic brain.
I thought D9 was a decent film, but the thing that ruined it for me was the shift on POV. I loved the intro documentary approach, but somewhere in the middle of the film they chucked that out the window in favor of a straight-up narrative. The movie never fully recovered for me after that.
I liked the movie. As a South African I understood some of the subtleties that may have been missed by those foreign to the region.
South Africa has 11 languages, people often converse in their mother tongue and can understand another’s language without having to speak it. I grew up watching Afrikaans television, understood the language, but could not speak Afrikaans – so the language issue between prawns and humans is a non issue.
As for Wikus, I knew guys like this, the everyman, not-so-smart-wannabe good guy. He thinks he is diligent in his job and takes himself seriously.
Yes, there is a reference to apartheid, however there is also a strong reference to the huge influx of ‘illegal aliens’ to South Africa coming in from north of the border. When the people in the street talk about the prawns, you could replace that with Zimbabweans, Nigerians etc. And yes, your cell phone or shoes can and do get stolen by these ‘aliens’. That was some subtle tongue in cheek humor on the directors part.
This is more than a science fiction movie, it is a commentary on us as humans, and how we treat each other, how we see foreigners in our country, that we may have some redeeming qualities, but generally we are a sick bunch :)
As to the infection by the fuel, easy answer, the aliens use genetic technology for the guns and their fuel – The alien genetics in the fuel infected Wikus. MNU I think is a parody of the UN, hence the white vehicles crossed with armscor/dennel the SA arms manufacturer – Multi National Unit – funny in a way!
The premise is in reality not all that believable, I am sure we would treat aliens a lot better. this is a movie, it is far fetched, it is a story. In real life, we usually treat our ‘human aliens’ with such contempt and disrespect – much like in the movie ….
A thought provoking movie, one which I enjoyed immensely.
This was the old new south africa, with no Mandela as protagonist :)
I’d assumed Christopher was one of the alien leaders and the ship beneath his shanty was the command module that fell from the ship. Since his hovel had a gang sign on it he was some kind of leader, and since nobody turned him in as the leader I’d guessed the Prawns were far more organized than the Earthlings realized.
What I didn’t get was the insinuation that Prawns would find human prostitutes appealing and then the sudden reversal that Wikus was infected by sex with prawns.
I hated the evil corporation bit. Its old hat and lazy, and the DNA to fire the weapons was a bit lame. Still when those alien weapons fired it was pretty awesome and original.
I felt the prawns were far more realistic aliens than those in the flick Avatar. Yeah the Na’vi breathed air poisonous to humans and were extra tall but beyond that they were kind of idealized humans with culture hobbled together from different identifiable human sources. The Prawns on the other hand, well they were alien. We still don’t know much about them. Seeing as they were workers any vestige of their normal society was probably impossibly gimped before they arrived.
Oh, and I felt the Documentary footage made everything feel far more real than the 3d of Avatar.
I just wish he’d hacked 30 minutes or so out of the middle of District 9 and kept more of the documentary format.