MONDOmagazine

District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Key Creatives / Sony Pictures, 2009

By Caesar Martini

All right. All right, all right, all right. I used to send out movie reviews like it was my job (although the lack of compensation I received for doing this proved that it definitely wasn’t). Perhaps it was the love I had of the sound of my own voice, or my desire to crush everyone in my path under the weight of my magnificent and flawless opinion, but whatever “IT” was that compelled me to pump out movie reviews like Kate Gosselin pumps out children shrivelled up and died inside me some time ago (which would explain the smell). To my surprise, some people actually missed my reviews, which is odd considering that they rarely said anything about them whilst I was putting them out, the tossers. But I digress.

So here I find myself hacking at my keyboard once again, trying to verbalize a frothy-mouthed opinion on the most recent moving picture-show that has flickered across my dull, soulless eyes. What could have prompted me to take up a thankless past-time that I had previously shunned, you ask? Why, District 9, I answer, perhaps the bestest and awesomest movie I have seen this year (possibly until Zombieland comes out). I’ll warn my readers now (all six of you): if you’re uncomfortable with the mental image of a grown man trying his best to fellate a movie, you might want to skip to the end.

District 9 is a film written and directed by South African born Neill Blomkamp, who you have not heard of and indeed shouldn’t have, because he’s literally done nothing else except some special effects on Smallville and other piddly crap. You may have heard Peter Jackson’s name attached to it, but he had very little to do with the film beyond producing it (what the hell do producers do, anyway?) and lending his personal seal of approval to the project by prefacing each trailer with the wank-tastic “Peter Jackson presents” tagline — a recommendation that probably carries only a little more weight than the one I am currently delivering.

The plot of District 9 is as follows: twenty years ago, a massive alien spaceship just started hovering over Johannesburg (a refreshing change to, say, the White House, where it most certainly would have ended up if an American were directing the film). Once humans boarded it, they found almost 2 million prawn-like alien creatures, most dying of some kind of interstellar dysentery. They ferried the aliens to the ground, where apparently only the stupidest, laziest and most drone-like of them survive. Here the aliens (“prawns”) enter an existence none too subtly mirroring that of apartheid; they’re relocated to slums, shunned and reviled by the local population, and generally not allowed to live anywhere but in the ghetto of poverty and filth that humans have condemned them to. But since humans like living next to a million unstable, super-strong, idiotic, chitinous extraterrestrials about as much as I like living across the hall from a couple that allow their dogs to piss on everything and never clean it up, the government decides to move the District 9 slum 200 km away. It falls to Multinational United employee Wikus van der Mewre (and a small private army) to deliver relocation notices to the inhabitants of District 9. In the process of doing so, he is exposed to some kind of alien chemical, and things begin happening to him. Before long, Wikus is on the run from his own people and attempting to find a way to cure his condition with the aid of the only non-retarded prawn left.

A lot of my adoration for District 9 comes from the feeling of immersion and authenticity it gives the viewer. The style of presentation is a factor, but the film itself is just so damn realistic. As realistic as a movie about aliens can be, anyway. I have no problem thinking that if an alien craft appeared the way it did in the movie, events could unfold exactly as they did in District 9. Would some people try to eat aliens to gain their powers? Well, there are Ugandans who think that rape gives them magical fighting powers, so my answer to that is, “Hell yes, they would.” There are little things like that strewn all over the movie that make you think, “Wow, they really thought this through.” It’s this staggering feeling of authenticity that make me all too gleefully eager to overlook inconsistencies that would otherwise nag at me.

Further silencing the tiny nit-picky critical voice in my head was the quality of the special effects. They are excellent. The CGI prawns look completely plausible, with their own mannerisms and suitably alien movements, and they seem to have a weight to them rather than being a strange and dusty special effect that looks like a painted cardboard backdrop. All the effects are fantastic, or at least totally passable, and when I learned that District 9 was made for a paltry 30 million dollars, I became enraged and had to fight the compulsion to fill a canvas bag with gold bars and dog shit and then beat Michael Bay to death with it for making Transformers 2 — a movie with 6.5 times the budget of District 9 and 50 times the suck. Or Stephen Sommers, who directed GI JOE, a movie with a 175 million dollar budget that looks like about sixty bucks went into each special effect that it punished your eyes with — where did the rest of the money go, Sommers? Not script development.

Interestingly, District 9 commits two cardinal sins from my personal List of Unforgivable Moviemaking Sins, which I have completely forgiven. The first being Shaky Camera Work. Remember watching the scene in The Bourne Identity where Will Hunting is fighting that trained killer in his Paris apartment? Remember thinking how awesome that fight scene was? Then, do you remember watching The Bourne Supremacy and the fight scene he has with another trained killer, and thinking “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE??” A movie should not be akin to trying to scry the future through a smoky crystal ball; it should always be visually decipherable, otherwise what’s the point?

Yet somehow, District 9 manages to use some shaky handheld camera scenes while still presenting them in such a way that the viewer can figure out what’s going on. Hallelujah, it can be done! Moreover, it’s appropriate to the story, because the movie is initially presented as a documentary, complete with interviews of experts and the uninformed alike on the topic of the alien presence, and news crew footage of the events detailed in the movie. There’s a reason for the presentation of the movie that goes beyond some artsy-fartsy visionary direction the filmmakers wanted to take. And it works. I felt totally immersed in the story; even the slow part (before people started exploding and things took a sharp turn down Awesome Blvd.) at the beginning captivated me.

The second committed sin is that of The Unlikable Protagonist. Wikus is a fairly nice guy and devoted husband, but he’s also the most insidious kind of racist (or species-ist): the kind who doesn’t even know he’s a racist. In addition, he’s a bit of a twat — he’s vain, nerdy, has low self-esteem, and is a monumental coward. In short, he seems like a real person. Normally, I abhor watching movies where the person I’m supposed to be cheering for is so unlikable and annoying that I can’t wait for them to die from some horrible and painful disease (syphilis is a good one), but I didn’t feel that way with Wikus, despite his many faults. I think it was a nice change to see a more realistic depiction of a lead character in a science fiction film; someone who is just an ordinary, dickish person; someone who isn’t heavily-muscled, lantern-jawed, and capable of jumping off the moon and elbow dropping Osama Bin Laden into a bloody paste while smoking a cigar and throwing around pithy quips as if this was the sort of apocalyptic doomsday scenario he deals with on his days off from dealing with apocalyptic doomsdays.

In short, District 9 is not good; it’s great. Really great, and I think anyone who’s tired of seeing the same sci-fi or action movie parade around in front of them every other week — where the only thing that’s different about the previous week’s offering is that the main character is wearing a different hat — should really appreciate District 9. It’s different, and not in the “well, at least they tried to do something different” way, but in the “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sci-fi film quite like this and it’s bloody brilliant” kind of way.