District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Key Creatives/Sony Pictures 2009
By Brian Last
Due to a scrapping of the Halo film, Peter Jackson gave director Neill Blomkamp financing to make whatever he wanted. The result is District 9, and while Halo fans may be upset, I couldn’t be happier because it gave us this great film. While Blomkamp is no stranger to the biz (he has been in VFX on major Hollywood projects), this does mark his first sit in the director’s chair for a feature.
What starts out as a simple documentary turns into a story of struggle, for both man and alien kind. In this film, a race of extra terrestrials arrives on earth. They hover above Johannesburg and after three months of zero activity, the humans decide to take action by cutting into the ship. It is here that they find the aliens, who appear to be malnourished. The aliens are pulled from the ship and forced to live in a camp. The poor conditions at the camp turn this section of Johannesburg into a slum, with poverty, violence, and debauchery. The people of Johannesburg want the aliens to go home. The government, however, has other plans for them. They plan to evict the aliens from their shacks and move them to a camp outside the city that is smaller and more of a concentration camp. It is during these evictions that the man selected to head the operation, Wikus Van De Mewre, is exposed to a foreign chemical. Things will go from bad to worse.
District 9 has a lot of strengths. I really liked the way the story is told — it starts out like a documentary, then we are pulled into the real story as Wikus struggles to make it through. I enjoyed the care and craft that Blomkamp applied to the film. The aliens’ look was original and had subtle features that other directors generally don’t take the time to put in. It also showed great creativity to make a completely original back story for the aliens, who have their own language and markings like an ancient tribe. The film even gives them their own addictive vice, which was very humorous.
I also liked Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus. He starts out as a very friendly optimist who believes in the cause, and that aliens and humans can interact and cooperate. As he transforms, so too does his personality. His experience is not unlike someone with a terminal illness going through the stages of grief; in becoming an alien, Wikus may as well be dead, and he goes through it all. I also liked the relationship between Wikus and Christopher Johnson, an alien that Wikus takes a personal interest in. The expression “never judge me until you have walked a mile in my shoes” rings particularly true to Wikus as he gets a taste of how both sides live and what they go through. This is why Wikus risks it all to help Christopher.
My only main concern with the film is that they spent so much time keeping the story grounded and simple, going to great lengths to present these events as they actually could happen, only to abandon this aesthetic toward the end. Heading into the climax, District 9 gets a little carried away and over the top, like Independence Day.
But in spite of the excessive ending, the film was well shot, told a great story, had good acting, and, most of all, was entertaining. It kept me drawn in from start to finish. I highly recommend this film to everyone. I have faith that Neill Blomkamp has a very good career ahead if he can keep telling these compelling stories in such a great way.
