Peter Jackson’s District 9 is a Strong, Expert Drama Disguised as a Summer Sci-Fi Film

Posted by ScuzzBuster

August 16, 2009

d91sheet The trailers for District 9 sparked my interest as one of those guilty pleasure pulp-sci-fi flicks that come along every once in a while. I have no shame in admitting that I will continue to be an unashamed apologist for films like Independence Day, Starship Troopers or Total Recall. Instead, producer Peter Jackson and director Neil Blomkamp have surprised us with a first class character study wrapped up in an allegorical cautionary tale about morality and racism. It succeeds so wildy in this approach that I was completely blindsided by a powerfully good film shattering my complete lack of any real expectations. One of the small pleasures that I appreciate most in this life is walking into a movie expecting nothing and walking out grinning ear to ear completely blown away.

Like many films that qualify into this “grinner” category for me, it falls into a genre where it’s easy to get lost in a sea of crap. When a sci-fi film ends up having so much to say and does so as skillfully as District 9, it immediately stands out as something special. I have a couple of minor nitpicks with the story structure and nature of the narrative, but other than that, this film gets everything right.

district9-3 The premise of District 9 is not nearly as dependent on the science fiction element of the story as you might think. It’s simply an examination of what happens when you have a major modern city that suddenly has the problem of having to integrate a massive number of foreign refugees into their society. Now toss in the fact that the city is Johannesburg, South Africa and the time period is the 1980s. For those either under 30 and/or completely oblivious to world culture and politics, I’m not going to recount why that’s pertinent. You have a computer, learn to use Wikipedia or a take a junior high level history course. Suffice it to say that introducing this scenario into a culture that already had massive and glaring political issues in race relations, segregation and civil rights basically spins this interesting refugee story into overdrive.

In this case, the refugees happen to drop in via a massive spacecraft that glides unceremoniously to a stop over Johannesburg and sits for a couple of months with no signs of life, intelligence or activity before the drastic action of aggressively cutting it open is taken. Inside there is shock at the discovery of over a million malnourished, unhealthy and/or dying aliens in this now crippled craft. And make no mistake, these aliens are gross. They have an insect like body structure and all sorts of ugly appendages including unattractive tentacles on their face.

As expected, as we assist in helping nurse the sick ones back to health the problem of what to do with a million homeless ugly bugs becomes a major issue. A refugee camp that becomes known as District 9 becomes their home. Meanwhile, the majority of the South African residents, in spite of how much sympathy they may or may not have for the big bugs, don’t really want to spend much time around them and the city becomes even more massively segregated.

district9-51 Even though the aliens quickly prove to be intelligent beings (obviously technologically advanced) District 9 falls prey to the same problems that any massively overcrowded slum does. It’s dirty, crime is rampant, violence and social tensions internally and with the humans grow out of hand quickly. Set in this alternate present where the aliens have been in this South African slum for the past 20 years, the film’s narrative uses the skeleton structure of a documentary recounting the events surrounding the government’s decision to evict the aliens and move them 250 kilometers outside of the city to a “resettlement” camp. The documentary centers around Wikus Van De Merwe, a timid employee of MNU, the company that’s in charge of alien affairs and the man promoted to the lead of the “evicition” of these aliens to the new settlement camp.

Since the aliens were given status as citizens after their initial settlement, each and every one has to be served a semi-legal eviction notice in person and the military is brought in to try to maintain order during these evictions. The meek and seemingly likeable Van De Merwe begins to show that deep down he is just as bigoted and usympathetic towards the aliens as anyone else, he just works through it with a little bit more awareness of his own mortality through the process of working door to door in the alien slums.

The interview subjects of the documentary segments of District 9 continue to make reference to the “decisions” that Van De Merwe made and we quickly become aware that something major happened surrounding this mass eviction that caused him to end up holding the bag fairly or unfairly, but the events themselves are kept a mystery in these segmenets since the main narrative of the film recounts the ugly story.

The trailers for this film really gave me that “consipiracy” feel district9-4 that there was some massive secret plan of the aliens that was going to explode this film into a sci-fi thrill fest by act 3. I don’ t think it would classify as a spoiler to say that this really doesn’t end up being the case. In fact, we quickly come to see that the aliens are as unorganized and on the ropes as they appear to be. The fact is, the film moves slowly from high massive concept to the story of one man, Wikus, one alien (humourously named “Chris Johnson”) and that alien’s young son. It is a testament to the effects work, the script, and Blomkamp’s direction that the performance of one CGI character who speaks entirely in clicks and subtitles turns out to be the most grounded and sympathetic character in the piece. That’s not because of poor performances or scripting, it’s absolutely the intention.

Let’s not beat around the bush, the first 30 minutes of District 9 is as compelling of a drama of any type that you’re likely to see this year. The documentary style immediately draws you into an intense curiosity about the details of the events that they establish have already happened. This tempers the audience expectations from the outset that this film isn’t going to end with cities on fire in the midst of a human/alien war, at least not in any traditional sense. However, this does lead to a couple of problems with how it’s structured. There is a bit of a let down atmosphere in the transition from act 1 to act 2 as it moves from a large scale story about human and alien race relations to being a somewhat smaller scale nervous thriller focusing around our two main characters. In addition, the transitions of focus between the documentary sequences and the POV of the main character make the narrative a little clumsy from a traditional rules of story telling standpoint. It’s generally a bit of a no-no to tell a story with blurred and unclear hops between incompatible perspectives of the same events. It can be done, but if there’s any great sin in District 9 it’s the flow between the documentary pieces of the story versus the events we’re seeing that are obviously outside the cameras and knowledge of the documentary-within-a-film’s perspective. These sins would be major sticking points in a film that drives through a less compelling and engaging story, but they are easily glossed over here.

The icing on the cake here is that the film looks fantastic. The dull, gritty look reminded me a bit of the style of Terminator Salvation. The only reason I found myself drawing this comparison was that by the end, District 9 only really had one large scale action sequence at it’s heart, and compared to Terminator Salvation’s biggest moments it was fairly small potatoes. The big difference here was that by the time the film built to this climax we are so drawn into the story emotionally that it had 10 times the impact of any single moment in that big budget bust from this spring. And that’s not to downplay in the slightest how damned impressive the digital effects are. I would find it difficult to say that I’ve seen any film with the effects scale of this one where the integration was so expertly woven into a believable and familiar environment.

district9-11 I don’t believe that there’s anyone that would remotely have enough interest in this film to read this far that I could not recommend this film to. I say drive, don’t walk to this film and fork over your hard earned cash gladly. It’s a rarity in any year to have the pleasure of seeing a sci-fi film this entertaining yet this relevant and it is a stunningly good jaunt in this final stretch of the summer movie run. You could strip all the sci-fi elements out of this story and it would easily be just as engaging and wonderful…and probably much more likely to win awards come first of next year. Films with characters with tentacles tend to get unfairly passed over as this one probably will. Any accolades it gets will be well deserved.