District 9

District 9 has its origins in a short film by Neill Blomkamp called Alive in Joburg from 2005. Blomkamp was tapped by Peter Jackson to direct the porting of the videogame Halo to the big screen but, when that venture fell through, the green light was given to expanding the short into a feature-length film. Here is Alive in Joburg:



District 9 opens using a documentary style including interviews with faux experts and stock footage to set the backdrop for what is to follow. An enormous alien spacecraft had settled above Johannesburg but done nothing. No radio transmissions, no little green envoys – not a peep. After a few months, authorities decided to investigate for themselves. Crews boarded the craft and found millions of malnourished aliens huddled in unwashed masses. Apparently the ship had become inoperable and they found themselves stranded.

An area within the city was enclosed with barbed wire and made into a refugee camp for the interstellar pilgrims – district 9. Years passed and the camp turned into a DMZ laden with crumbling shacks and piles of waste and debris. A Nigerian gang lord and his cronies moved into the shantytown and setup shop. They profited handsomely by exploiting the aliens' inexplicable desire for cat food. By this time, the government had handed control of District 9 over to a large corporation, Multinational United (MNU).

The situation deteriorated and festered until the citizens of Johannesburg decided that they had had enough of the "prawns", a derogatory term for the aliens who were endowed with a mouth covered by antennae. Since the visitors could not be repatriated, they were to be resettled in a tent camp outside of the city. Sharlto Copley plays Wikus van der Merwe, a mid-level MNU bureaucrat assigned by his father-in-law to lead the resettlement project. I've read that van der Merwe is the Afrikaaner equivalent of our Smith so our hero is actually a generic everyman type. Preparations are made and finally the day arrives when van der Merwe and a group of armored personnel carriers enter District 9 to begin the arduous task of getting the aliens to sign a form giving their consent to being relocated.



The camera work her e is hand-held, continuing the documentary feel of the opening exposition. Indeed, it's like watching COPS as we witness van der Merwe, accompanied by armed guard, go door-to-door trying to get aliens to commit to relocation. At one point the film's style abruptly comes to a halt as we cut away to two of the aliens extracting, filtering, and then bottling a strange liquid in a metal cylinder. They are hurried as their evictor is just down the street. When he arrives, he finds the shack empty but he finds the cylinder. van der Merwe mistakenly discharges some of the liquid on his face and falls ill. Soon it is revealed that he is slowly transmogrifying into one of them.

Act 1 closes with van der Merwe on the run from his former employers, MNU. The advanced alien weapons discovered on the ship can only be fired by one of the visitors as the two are genetically linked. Erog the villainous corporate executives drool at the prospect of using van der Merwe to unlock their secrets and make a fortune.

From here, the film goes south and becomes a hybrid itself. Corporation chasing an employee? Right out of Minority Report. van der Merwe eventually befriends one of the aliens who says that he can reverse his infection if they can get a hold of that metal cylinder and back to the lifeless ship hanging above the city. This adds an equal measure of buddy movie ala Lethal Weapon into the mix. The second and third acts completely betray the first by wallowing in clichés.

This is a real shame as act 1 is really marvelous. First it is refreshing, if a bit of a novelty, to set the film in Blomkamp's native South Africa instead of New York, Chicago, L.A., or London. Second, Blomkamp adroitly turns some sci-fi movie conventions on their heads. That shiny, gleaming spaceship light years ahead of our technology is stalled in hover mode. The aliens who usually have mankind on the run in Roland Emmerich films are instead living in slums and at our mercy. In addition, there's some good black humor, especially the absurdity of trying to get aliens to sign paperwork. As we watch the inept van der Merwe blunder his way through the slums, do we feel sorry for or loathe this corporate lackey?



But all of this is wasted in the last two acts which are nothing but an extended chase sequence littered with shootouts featuring an alien weapon that liquefies its victims. Plus Blomkamp leaves other conventions intact. For instance, there's the evil corporation personified by our hero's father-in-law, Piet Smit. Smit is reminiscent of Max von Sydow's Burgess in Minority Report while cold, heartless companies abound in sci-fi cinema - Alien, RoboCop, etc.

Also wasted is any attempt to give this thinly-veiled allegory of Apartheid any thematic heft. While I don't doubt for a minute that, if I were South African, I would have caught more references to my homeland, I didn't see anything which led me to believe that Blomkamp was doing anything more than throwing in references to the South Africa of his childhood as he could. The film's title is a reference to District 6, an area in Cape Town where tens of thousands of non-Afrikaaners were forcibly removed. But other than using South Africa under Apartheid as a source of reference to create his future version of Johannesburg, Blomkamp didn't do much with his scenario other than have people shoot at one another. Sure, you can see a bit of our venture in Iraq reflected back to us in the slums, especially with the MNU soldiers who could be stand-ins for Blackwater mercenaries, but so what? It's all done in passing and the film doesn't ask us to consider parallels to our world because it's too busy moving on to the next round of gunfire.

This is not to say that District 9 is a bad film because it has a lot going for it. I liked how it went from faux doc style to more conventional Hollywood. From a technical point of view, it was a joy to watch. The special effects were wonderful despite the comparatively small budget and the acting was excellent. And there are some great visceral thrills to be had. But Blomkamp sets things up to be more than just shootouts. The first act held promise for some good, hard science fiction but we ended up with a generic action flick.