Out of the ashes of the failed Halo movie comes the best sci-fi movie of 09.
In a Hollywood summer season where films such as Transformers 2 and GI: Joe are raking in the cash by hiding the fact they have no discernible storyline with a non-stop assault of explosions and incoherent in-your-face action sequences, it’s refreshing to find something truly original and thrilling made for a fraction of the cost. Even the marketing campaign of District 9 is innovative, I’m sure a lot of you will have seen posters dotted around the city with a hotline to report ‘non human activity’. With a small marketing budget, this viral strategy ala Cloverfield and strong word of mouth will see District 9 get the audience it so rightly deserves.
For those of you who don’t know, District 9 is the result of the Halo movie going into limbo. Neill Blomkamp was originally going to direct Halo under Peter Jackson’s guidance, but when that fell through they took Blomkamp’s short, Alive in Joburg, and adapted it to a full blown feature. Alive In Joburg’s originality captured Peter Jackson’s interest and was the reason Neill got the highly coveted Halo gig in the first place. PJ thought Neill deserved a chance to make his first feature so pretty much gave him free reign on District 9 – he even hired his best mate as the lead actor.
I’m getting carried away with myself. District 9 revolves around an alien race that came to Johannesburg around 20 years ago in a ship that remains stationary above the city to this day. For weeks, humans tried to make contact with the aliens til they eventually broke in, discovering over a million malnourished ‘prawns’ (the racist term the humans give them). A refugee camp was set up but over time it deteriorates into a slum, complete with hookers, a black market and Nigerian crime lords. We learn all this via a collection of excellently integrated documentary style footage – academics discussing the alien situation and archival news footage of rioting and early contact with the aliens.
It’s this faux documentary technique that shapes the first half of the film as we learn from Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharto Copley), an MNU (a multinational corporation tasked with looking after the aliens) employee that the aliens are to be transferred to a new District due to increasing tensions between humans and aliens. People are angry. The aliens show no sign of leaving and they are sick of them living in their city. Wikus takes us in with him to District 9 as the operation to relocate the aliens gets underway. The relocation is halted when Wikus gets contaminated by an alien fluid. Suddenly he finds himself the most wanted man in South Africa when it turns out the contamination allows him to operate the alien weaponry that MNU has been trying to unlock for the last 20 years. A fugitive and outcast from his friends and family Wikus finds himself stuck in the ghetto, where he enlists the help of an alien named Christopher Johnson whom he believes can help stop the drastic effects of the contamination.
The setting of a South African ghetto makes it impossible to ignore the underlying theme of racism running through the story as it connects deeply to South Africa’s history of apartheid. We are constantly reminded of the alien’s second class citizen status yet Blomkamp never makes the audience feel preached to. They might look and behave strangely but these creatures posses technology light years beyond human capability and just like us, they have children that they support and care for. Their insect-like look took a lot of work and such a design made it impossible to shoot with prosthetics so everything was done with CGI. Not once during any human-alien interaction did I notice the artifice, which says great things about the effects houses that worked on the movie, it shows you don’t need a $200million budget to get realistic visual effects.
The second half of the film is much more action focused as Wikus and Christopher rush to stop the full effects of the contamination. To a degree this shift in tone plays against the earlier work of the film but I can’t deny how unrelenting and exhilarating the last half of the film is. People were literally cheering and clapping in the cinema as Wikus outruns and outwits MNU at every turn. Action sequences are coming at you left right and centre with one particularly awesome one involving Wikus in a mechwarrior style getup where he stops a rocket in mid-flight – there is no way of describing how insanely cool this shot is. It’s the type of shot where you realise that you are witnessing a seriously good piece of cinema.
Amazingly, even with the ratcheted up action levels there is still an emotional core running through the film as Blomkamp sets up an E.T style payoff for our lead. As the final scenes played out I couldn’t believe it but I felt a huge amount of empathy for Christopher. The only minor flaws are the underdeveloped side characters – it’s really only Wikus who is fully fleshed out, but in a way it kind of works to have the MNU guys as a faceless entity, as the xenophobia rife in the film is felt as a whole rather than come from a few individuals. The soundtrack might come across as a tad stereotypical to some but I felt it connected the movie deeper with its South African roots.
I thought Star Trek was going to set the benchmark for sci-fi this year but District 9 has unequivocally blown that out of the water. For this to come from a first time feature director marks Neill Blomkamp as one to watch. I just hope the hinted at sequel goes into production as soon as possible. This is one of the most refreshingly original sci-fi flicks in years and I cannot recommend it enough. Indeed this is one of the best films of the year. Period.
4 1/2 Stars
Here is the original short film Alive In Joburg which became District 9: