Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 14, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Director/co-writer Neill Blomkamp has said that he didn’t intend District 9, his strikingly confident feature debut, to get too deep with its allegories, and it might have been an even better film if he had. The movie is so good at setting up its premise, rich with sociopolitical themes and dramatic possibilities, that it’s a bit of a letdown when it settles for standard chase-and-shoot action for most of its second half.
What commands the attention throughout is the physicality and specificity of the world Blomkamp, co-scripter Terri Tatchell and his talented creative team establish and maintain throughout District 9. The setting is Johannesburg, where a large alien spacecraft has been hovering over the city for over 20 years, and news broadcasts and “interviews” swiftly establish the backstory: the ship was full of extraterrestrial drones whose leaders had apparently died, and the creatures (derisively nicknamed “prawns”) were herded into the titular slum area. There, they have become a new underclass, subject to poverty, abuse, exploitation by Nigerian thugs—and occasional bursts of rebellion and violence.
Parallels to apartheid and other ills of the region are obvious but unforced, and those implicit connections help make the environment and basic situation 100 percent convincing. Ditto the mock-documentary style, which by now is familiar but still works in this fresh context and makes us fully acquainted with the landscape before the specific story gets started. As the vérité cameras take us deeper into District 9, our guide is Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who’s a bit of a drone himself—a paper-pusher for Multi-National United, the corporation that oversees the aliens and has been trying to figure out how to adapt their confiscated weapons for military use. With “prawn” attacks on humans on the rise, MNU is spearheading a relocation of the creatures to a new internment camp, and Wikus, whose greatest qualification seems to be that he’s married to the boss’ daughter, is chosen to head up the eviction.
As Wikus, tailed by both cameramen and armed soldiers, goes door to door with his clipboard serving notice to the extraterrestrials—which are understandably resistant to leave even their ramshackle homes—it’s clear that he’s in way over his head, and a palpable threat of danger hovers over this long sequence. Then he makes a discovery in one of the critters’ homes that drastically alters his stake in the situation, and puts him violently at odds with his superiors. That’s when the storyline becomes more conventional, as Wikus is forced to flee from one potential refuge to the next, unsure who to trust, forced to shoot his way out of certain predicaments—like a Bourne movie with aliens.
Stylistically, Blomkamp and cinematographer Trent Opaloch transition from the mock-doc aesthetics to the necessarily less vérité approach smoothly enough, and keep the proceedings pacey and exciting. Copley, who has never appeared in a film before, has an ease before the camera that makes him ingratiating even as Wikus is a bit of a wonk at the beginning, and maintains sympathy as his personal stakes become life-and-death. The most remarkable “performances,” however, are delivered by the aliens. Resembling what might have resulted if humans were descended from insects instead of apes, with big, expressive eyes peering out from behind facial tentacles and mouth parts, these CGI creations achieve a level of anthropomorphic characterization and physical plausibility unseen in a digital creature probably since the star of Peter Jackson’s King Kong—like the “prawns,” a product of Jackson’s Weta FX company. The Lord of the Rings king shepherded District 9 to the screen, and all the craft aspects of the film are first-rate, remarkably so considering it was brought in at a comparative bargain price of $30 million.
Fans of Jackson’s early work will be pleased by the high level of splatter on view; District 9 is chock full of weapons that cause human and alien targets to disintegrate in spectacularly bloody ways. Eventually, though, all the carnage becomes a bit numbing, particularly as the feeling grows that the gunplay and use of other destructive hardware (including a robotic suit carrying echoes of everything from RoboCop to Iron Man) is substituting for potentially richer dramatic conflict. There’s nothing wrong with a lot of hardcore action, and District 9 invests it with far more interest than a mindless spectacle like the Transformers films, but Blomkamp sets a high, provocative bar in the opening reels that the last hour doesn’t quite reach. But it’s clear that he’s still got plenty of ideas left regarding this scenario, as the movie ends with a couple of promising plot threads left untied—making the prospect of a District 10 a welcome one.
