District 9 review

District 9 is a film I have been excited about for months now.

South African director Neill Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) have made a tale of an alien ship that becomes stranded hovering over a near future Johannesburg. The main part of the film takes place 20 years after their arrival, and the aliens are confined to a disgusting slum outside the city, with legal segregation from the human population enforced by a massive corporation and its paramilitary mercenaries, Multi National United (MNU).

What excited me about the film was the possible combination of exciting visual effects and action with an intelligent and original sci fi story using allegorical aliens to discuss South Africa’s difficult racial history and present.

The final result certainly lived up to all my hopes in terms of an action sci fi adventure. However, its stand politically with regards to racism left a bit to be desired.

Visually, District 9 is probably the best example of a certain kind of film making that has been infecting cinema for around a decade now-cinema verite style shaky cameras. Starting with the Blair Witch Project through Cloverfield, the Bourne films and even the new TV incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, the faux documentary has been used with varying success. The thing that makes it work in District 9 is that it intercuts this with interviews with various corporate heads, academics and local people giving it the feel of a real documentary.

The talking heads introduce the starting point of the film-the forced relocation of the aliens by MNU to a virtual concentration camp in the wilderness. Leading this effort is Wikus van der Meurwe (Sharlto Copley), a South African office bureaucrat charged with overseeing the operation. Wikus isn’t one of the terrifyingly played white mercenaries of the company, but he is still a casual racist who openly refers to the aliens by the derogatory name of “Prawns”, and isn’t afraid to ruthlessly enforce human domination over the aliens. He’s the type of ordinary, unremarkable man that could easily have been a member of the Gestapo or indeed an enforcer of Apartheid.

The story of the film involves Wikus in a cathartic transformation that leads him to seeing things from the aliens’ perspective and ending up fighting alongside one of them who has been covertly preparing the way for them to be able to finally leave Earth. Whilst never becoming a fully good guy, Wikus is compelled by self interest to see things in a new way.

One thing that makes me really hopeful about this film is that it was, both visually and in the story, very original, but was made for what is, by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters, a modest $30 million. It proves that the current obsession with remakes, reboots and flogging dead horses in sci fi cinema really is a result of laziness rather than some total failure of creativity.

The problem I had with this film is that the director’s political position remains pretty opaque. The aliens themselves live in a disgusting rubbish dump, where they brawl, steal and get high on cat food. It’s difficult at first to view them sympathetically, which obviously raises questions about them as allegorical representations of black people. Ultimately, their hope for salvation from this situation lies in the actions of a (somewhat) enlightened outsider, and a lone intelligent leader. It’s at least implied in the film that the quasi-insectoid aliens operate in a caste-like way, and that most of their leaders are dead, leaving them shiftless slum dwellers.

But, on the other hand, it is necessary to make aliens feel alien, and as the film progresses we do get drawn into the world of District 9 and the daily grind and oppression faced by the aliens. All the action takes place in real world locations in Johannesburg. As director Blomkamp says:

“In my opinion, the film doesn’t exist without Jo’burg. It’s not like I had a story, and then I was trying to pick a city. It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.”

The real problem lies with the depiction of the Nigerian gangsters who have moved in to exploit the aliens. They are brutal, exploitative and violent. Fair enough, they’re gangsters. What is pretty disgusting is that they are obsessed with gaining the power of the aliens, employing “witch doctors” and eating raw alien organs in pursuit of their technology. On top of this we’re told they run prostitution rings to “service the aliens sexually.” Black people who are superstitious and sexually voracious? Sounds depressingly familiar from over a century of Hollywood’s stereotypes.

Apartheid is constantly visually referenced in the film with signs such “For humans only” over much of the city. But the ability of the film to be any kind of an intelligent comment on Apartheid and current South Africa is pretty fatally undermined by the obviously questionable racial stereotypes it has of human black people.

However, apart from probably the other (relatively) low budget underdog Moon, District 9 definitely is the best sci fi release of the year, and one of the best in a good while. The evil corporation truly are racist capitalist and evil, and watching them getting attacked by incredible alien weaponry is pretty thrilling to watch. District 9 definitely shows it’s still possible to make an exciting, original and intelligent sci fi blockbuster without spending the GDP of a small country. My only qualification would be that it wasn’t as intelligent or politically progressive as I was hoping for. Its definitely one to go see in the cinema, as long as you’re thinking critically about some of the things it puts across, and really gives me hope for the future of science fiction film making.