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District 9

Almost a great movie, Neil Blomkamp’s first feature has a great premise; vivid, witty design; and a story that dumbs down the longer it goes on.

District 9 is the worst shantytown in Johannesburg – which is saying something. It’s literally a no-man’s land. This is where they put the aliens they pulled out of the giant space ship hovering, immobile, over the city skyline.

Sick, weak, and apparently helpless, these creatures don’t give any hint of how they crafted such an impressive transporter. Skinny, scaly, ugly bugs that stand about 8 foot tall fully grown, the visitors are quickly dubbed “prawns” by the unimpressed human population, a term of abuse that echoes the racial epithets so common in South Africa’s past.

After ten or twenty years, the prawns are just another plague of needy illegal immigrants, fostering blackmarket crime, hostility and suspicion. Which is why the authorities decide that enough is enough: they will forcibly close down District 9 and move the million-strong community to a more hygienic location, hundreds of miles from a significant human population centre.

First, though, the lawyers require the prawns’ consent. Which is where low-level bureaucrat Wikus (Sharlto Copley) comes in… Promoted by his prospective father in law, Wikus is sent into the camp with an armed escort of trigger-happy mercenaries to secure the aliens’ cooperation. And that’s when things start to go horribly wrong…

Presented in the now-familiar fake-doc style – at least until Blomkamp gets bored with its limitations when the action hots up – District 9 is an edgy little B movie with an injection of impressive big money special effects courtesy of Lord of the Rings director-producer Peter Jackson.

The production is a truly global affair: South African-born, Blomkamp learned his trade in Canada, and found a powerful mentor in New Zealand. But it’s the unusual location that allows this allegory to resonate.

The parallels are obvious, especially in the brutal manner the humans treat their supposedly inferior visitors, but it’s interesting to note that Blomkamp was inspired specifically by the huge numbers of refugees from Zimbabwe in his native country, not apartheid per se.

The satire is laid on nice and thick – there’s more than a hint of Starship Troopers in the scene where Wikus proudly demonstrates the art of aborting alien off-spring with the aid of a flame-thrower, all for the edification of the viewers back home.

In a deliciously eccentric touch the prawns have an inexplicable hungering for cat food – which is subsequently the hottest item on the black market.

Less successful is the sketchily fleshed out idea that there is a reverse trade in alien weaponry, even though it’s 100 percent ineffective here on Earth.

Over the course of an eventful couple of days our man Wikus undergoes profound physical, emotional and spiritual changes – he becomes the lynchpin of the picture. But Blomkamp neglects to explain why we’re still in cinema-verite shakicam mode long after Wikus is a fugitive, and his rapport with a more cerebral prawn, and its kid, is not particularly believable. Stop to think about it too long and all manner of nagging questions arise.

Not that you’re invited to stop and think – the last half hour is given over to the kind of over-egged action that is de rigueur in Hollywood these days.

Based on the director’s six-minute short, District 9 could and probably should have made a memorable low budget 90-minute midnight movie. But stretched to 112 minutes and pumped up with the best special effects $30 million can buy, the film gatecrashes the mainstream and overstays its welcome.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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