District 9 (****)

Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Eugene Khumbanyiwa, Nathalie Bolt, Sylvaine Strike, Louis Minnaar, Vanessa Haywood, David James
Seen: August 28th 2009

**** Out of ****

The year is 1982 and an alien spaceship didn’t come to New York or London or Tokyo, but rather to Johannesburg, South Africa, doing absolutely nothing, apart from hovering over the city for three months. So eventually we flew up there and cut a whole into the giant ship, revealing a perplexing find – approximately one million aliens (who are eventually, and derogatively, referred to as prawns) close to death from starvation, and we opened up our hearts, helped them down, and gave them a home – the government camp District 9, which eventually became a slum.

Present day, and the slum has become so much of an “inconvenience” to South Africans living in Johannesburg that, without any consideration for the aliens, District 9 would be relocated to District 10, 240km from Johannesburg. Signs banning non-humans are everywhere, segregation in full swing. Humans and aliens can communicate (humans speak English and aliens speak their click-click home language (subtitled), and everyone understands everyone), but the aliens are oppressed, reminding us strongly of apartheid in South Africa during the 70’s and 80’s. The military wing of MNU (Multi-National United) tries desperately to figure out how to use the alien’s weapons, while the rest of the population (including the aliens themselves) wants the aliens to go back to their home-world.

Wikus van de Merwe (Copley) is a slightly clueless but eager and quite obnoxious MNU field operative given the audacious task of the relocation by knocking on doors and having aliens sign eviction notices. He sees this almost as a joke, tackling this arduous task with an exuberant excitement that borders on insanity, simply expecting the aliens to drop everything and leave, not for a minute considering their humanity (the irony…) as more than a passing annoyance. In one scene upon finding an alien hatchery in a District 9 shack, he aborts some of the alien eggs with a nonchalant attitude that begs disbelief, as he simply removes the tubes feeding the eggs, all the while discussing the mechanics of it all as if presenting a documentary on boiling water. When the hatchery is burned, he relates the bursting sounds to popcorn, and the viewer only realises the level of arrogance in this presentation on further reflection after the movie has finished.

Now obviously it all won’t simply go without incident, as Wikus and his team discover “illegal” alien activity – a makeshift science lab where three aliens (among them the strangely named Christopher Johnson and his son) have just completed extracting a dark fluid from older alien technology, and as Wikus finds this canister he unwittingly sprays himself with this liquid – an event that becomes this story’s catalyst. He is injured shortly thereafter and gets his arm bandaged, which is not a fix at all, as he grows pale and very sick. What follows I had read about beforehand, but I will leave the details out of this review. Suffice it to say that Wikus has some very tough issues to deal with while everything goes down, and the way he raises to the occasion is classic hero stuff, with a just as classic antagonist coming into play in the form of Kobus Venter (James), a sadistic MNU soldier.

The movie is very violent, with people blown to bits on various occasions, and visually gory even in scenes not featuring exploding humans. The only English swearword in the entire film is in subtitles, when Obesanjo (Khumbanyiwa), the Nigerian warlord who reigns a part of District 9 by abusing the aliens’ addiction to cat-food, threatens Wikus. That is not to say that swearing is limited though, as pervasive and continuous Afrikaans swearing permeates the movie, and some Afrikaans swearwords won’t even register if you don’t speak the language yourself, as they aren’t subtitled (the f-word is close enough to its English counterpart however, so no confusion should exist there).

While the apartheid angle has been debated endlessly since the movie’s release, and while I can fully acknowledge and appreciate its incisive commentary on South African politics (you almost end up hating the humans presented in District 9), I picked up on something else – this is an absolutely brilliant science fiction movie with a sense of realism unmatched by most. Usually the aliens just come to earth to blow us all to smithereens, but here we are shown what I believe would be a more realistic approach – what if they are technologically advanced but still have a weakness, or many weaknesses? The film is an entirely fresh look at science fiction – it’s brilliance almost underscored by the understated but highly effective and believable visual effects, from the presence of the big ship visible through the city smog, to the on-screen presence of the prawns (the actors actually direct themselves at the aliens), to the smaller alien craft (machines and weapons). Everything in this film just works, and works well, from the humour to the action to the drama, District 9 is awesome.