District 9
Earlier this summer, director JJ Abrams’ nifty “Star Trek” reboot made science fiction cool again, giving us a smart action film where optimism was the name of the space game. Here, in the waning days of summer, however, we have director Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” to contend with, a film that proves just as fantastic as it does unsettling and unforgiving.
Where “Star Trek” reawakens a sense of promise and hope for the future—“to boldly go where no man has gone before”—“District 9” brings us crashing back down to earth right along side the aliens who find themselves unexpectedly stranded here on earth.
The film opens with interview footage with Multi-National United workers and officials describing the awesome sight of an alien spaceship arriving in Johannesburg, South Africa decades earlier. For the film’s first ten minutes or so, the MNU interviews set up a disturbing account of our initial encounter with the mysterious ship hovering near the slums of Johannesburg. After some initial hesitation, curious earthlings with badges board the alien spacecraft only to discover some seriously malnutritioned extraterrestrials huddled together and clinging to life.
It is a startling moment, one that resets the rules of the alien invasion game. “Independence Day” this film is not and this scene, its Will Smith “Welcome to Earff” moment, hits harder than any digitized White House explosion.
Instead of an invasion, world leaders must decide what to do with the aliens, “bottom feeders” who have a thing for canned cat food. Soon, MNU, a private company, is placed in charge of relocating the aliens to District 9. Relocation begets confinement, as many of the impoverished citizens living in the slums of Johannesburg start to blame the aliens for increased crime, poverty and all other wicked things that this way come.
Tensions only continue to rise and MNU decides to relocate District 9 to an area just outside of Johannesburg, putting one of its field operatives, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) in charge of relocating the aliens.
Wikis is a slimy, unsympathetic man, a company man intent on walking settlement to settlement in District 9 and handing out eviction notices to unsuspecting aliens. This he does and the scenes recall the worst images from Gaza and the West Bank.
“District 9” is intelligent sci-fi done right, well-shot with equal parts thrills, action, and political allegory. The smartest sci-fi tends towards the social commentary, from “The Thing from Another World” in the 1950s with its communist-walk-amongst us theme to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” with its similar McCarthy-esque undertones.
Here, “District 9” hits a nerve with its extraterrestrials as The Other vibe. That the film never oversteps its bounds to venture into the heavy-handed suggests both the film’s cleverness and its restraint.
And, “District 9” only gets better as it moves along. It never plays nice because it does not have to. Its alien invasion tale feels ripped from any number of headlines on global immigration battles, apartheid, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, etc. By the time the rock-em, sock-em, shoot-em finale kicks in, you’re unsure whether you’re watching a summer sci-fi film or a BBC World News broadcast.
Director Neill Blomkamp’s direction is as beautiful as it is relentless. His camera glides alongside fancy alien guns—clearly an indication of where he and producer Peter Jackson wish to take their long-delayed film adaptation of the “Halo” videogame” —and puts you right there with the fancy explosions.
Still, the film is not about shiny things blow up, something Sharlto Copley’s terrific performance as the film’s unlikely “hero” certainly proves.
Blomkamp understands that his film is really about these characters and the disconcerting world he has created on screen. Think a dash of “Slumdog Millionaire” with a hint of Cronenberg wrapped in a dirty sci-fi blanket. In other words, Blomkamp has delivered the most engaging and exciting film of the summer, and perhaps the year.
Grade: A
