Review - District 9
Among the very many hard-to-classify films I’ve seen in my time, District 9 is one of the hardest. And that’s a good thing, because too many films these days are a high concept with no high plot to support it.
I really don’t want to give too much of the plot of this one away, so I’ll summarise what is revealed in the documentary style opening few minutes:
Twenty years ago, a massive alien mothership arrived on Earth and settled itself into the sky above Johannesburg. It made no sign or further move, and eventually a South African force boarded it, finding thousands of malnourished, apparently leaderless aliens. These visitors were settled into a shanty town/slum on the edge of the city called District 9. Twenty years later, their numbers growing and tensions between the locals and these ‘Prawns’ (as they’re known) growing with them, it’s decided that the aliens need to be resettled to another camp several hundred miles outside the city. The job is given to a multinational corporation, and the role of overseer to the operation is given to what is clearly a mid-level office drone called Wikus Van Der Merwe.
Even that pseudo documentary sows suggestions that bad things happened as a result of the operation, and the rest of the film shows what they were. Along the way, the film becomes a political story, a conspiracy thriller, a romance, a very strange buddy movie, and possibly most unexpectedly, an action movie, with Wikus its unlikely action hero.
Those who’ve seen the trailer will have seen the handheld style and naturalistic look that could potentially mark this out as this year’s Cloverfield, but that superficial similarity doesn’t do District 9 justice. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Cloverfield. But it lacks anything approaching the complexity and originality on display here.
It’s not, perhaps, an easy film to watch. It’s graphically violent (though in an almost comic, over the top style), and what happens to Wikus is unpleasant on many levels. But it’s a film that makes you think, and there aren’t enough of those around, and it’s crafted superbly, from the integration of the effects through to the overall filming style, to the plot and script to the performances. There are a couple of big unanswered questions concerning the set-up at the start of the film that bothered me a little as I was watching (no spoilers), but generally the fate of the Prawns in the twenty years since their arrival is all too familiar from years of news footage of one displaced population or another.
In many ways, it’s also a film that is uniquely South African - the shadow of apartheid hangs over the film as much as the alien ship hangs over the city, and director/co-writer Neill Blomkamp is obviously not blind to the connections.
Sci-fi, as I’ve remarked before, is at its best when it uses its milieu to cause its audience to think about the real world. District 9 is an outstanding example of that, and I highly recommend it. It’s bleak, but ultimately uplifting, and if you need your sci-fi to have big zap guns and explosions, it even offers plenty of those.