Directed by Neil Blomkamp. 113 minutes.
Starring Sharlto Copley. Released by Sony Pictures.
The cinematic summer of 2009 ends with a bang, appropriately enough, following three months of nonstop bangs, booms, blowups and brawls. But director Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 is of a more philosophical nature than its summer peers and its action complements the story, rather than dictates it. The film, which is an extension of a short film that the director had previously made, was discovered by Peter Jackson, who has helped it to get released in the United States. It could have been the sleeper of the summer had The Hangover not already become the unbeatable champion of that title, at least financially.
Like so many other great science fiction yarns, Blomkamp’s film is also a social commentary, a quite brilliant one at that. The picture reinvents the history of the world through documentary footage, which dominates the film’s first half. In 1982, a large alien space ship landed in the sky above Johannesburg. The creatures aboard the craft were treated as so many illegal immigrants by being rounded up into dirty ghettos, routinely inspected by the authorities and generally maligned. The film’s central action takes place twenty years after the aliens, also known as prawns, have arrived on Earth. Sharlto Copley plays Wikus Van De Merwe, a bureaucrat whose wicked stepfather has signed him on to be the person responsible for evicting the alien beings from their current slum-like conditions and send them to the concentration camp-esque settlement known as District 10. Apartheid, that scourge of so many years in South Africa, is obviously the microcosm at play in District 9, although the treatment of any group of aliens, so to speak, suffices here.
The film’s first half provides more of the stuff, if you will. Most of the picture’s story is told during this section through the same type of documentary footage that was employed in Cloverfield. The film’s second half, though not nearly as thoughtful as the first section, is the more entertaining half, but its storytelling is slightly more pedestrian. It’s a give and take that actually works in the film’s favor. As to be expected, the aliens, though occassionally violent, are the more sympathetic life forms on display here, while the humans are, technically, the villains. Wikus, during an accident while inspecting a prawn hovel, is infected with some sort of alien virus and begins to transform into one of the creatures. District 9 devolves into a violent chase thriller as Wikus and a few of the prawns attempt to hatch a plan that would transform him back into a full-blooded human as well as give the aliens a chance to escape back to their home planet. Guns are drawn, explosions carried out, a few heads squish and some nasty people get their comeuppance.
Any slight gripes one might have about the film’s second half becoming more routine can be easily overlooked by the fact that District 9 represents such a fresh new voice in the sci-fi genre and is head and shoulders more clever, better executed and stylistically inventive than any other of its type this summer or this year. In fact, its raw intensity, visual style and thematic resonance reminded me less of the obvious films from which it borrows – Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, but reminds me of the urgency I felt watching Danny Boyle’s powerful 28 Days Later. Blomkamf has the potential to be a major new talent and District 9 is a good start. The specifics of apartheid might be lost on some Americans – though hopefully not – yet the picture’s themes are universal and applicable to virtually any culture.