District 9 (2009)Starring: Sharlto Copley, David James, Louis Minnaar, Vanessa Haywood
I received some news of a personal nature today which was sufficiently distressing that after a vein attempt at continuing with my thesis work I decided to abandon it for the day. I decided to watch a movie to get my mind off things, so went for something I'd seen before and I knew I'd enjoy, Niell Blomkamp's debut feature District 9.
Almost 30 years ago a massive spaceship came to a halt over the South African capital of Johannesburg. For humanitarian reasons the aliens on board, found to be horribly malnourished, were brought down and settled in District 9. Over time the fear of the human population lead to the security around District 9 being upgraded to the point that it resembled a prison. Finally the decision was made to relocate the aliens, derogatorily known as 'prawns', to a custom made facility further away from the city. The private corporation MNU, Multi-National United, who were in charge of policing District 9 are now charged with relocating the prawns. Bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe (Copley) is given the task of overseeing the operation. While delivering eviction notices in District 9 Wikus becomes infected with a mysterious alien fluid which sees him start to slowly transform into an alien. With the scientists at MNU now keen to experiment on him the only place Wikus can hide is in District 9, where he teams up with a prawn named Christopher Johnson who is planning an escape mission.
District 9's South African setting instantly creates connections between the science fiction narrative unfolding on screen and South Africa's apartheid history. The move first to restrict the 'prawns' to a defined area and then to move them further away from the city all takes on a greater significance because that city is Johannesburg. The fact that the area the 'prawns' are restricted to is called District 9 is an obvious reference to Cape Town's District 6, where Cape Town's coloured population lived before it was bulldozed to force their relocation. While the connections between District 9 and apartheid South Africa are blatant, Blomkamp insists that they are not meant to be direct metaphors. This is a film generally about prejudice rather than specifically about prejudice in South Africa. Regardless of whether the metaphor is specific or general, it is very clever and it is this use of the science fiction genre in aid of social commentary that really sets the film apart from nearly every science fiction film of the last decade.
Blomkamp employs a mocumentary style in telling his story. This mocumentary style is useful for getting information across to the viewer in a very direct manner. Early in the film the mocumentary style allows Blomkamp to establish the scenario relatively quickly, when more traditional film styles would have taken quite some time to explain just how a slum of aliens came to be living in Johannesburg. However the film seems to slip in and out of this documentary pretence, with some scenes very obviously shot as though there was a documentary crew present and others taking place in locations and situations in which there is no way there could be a documentary crew. The fact that the film switches between two different modes is not problematic, so much as the fact that these transitions seem to be arbitrary.
While District 9 is a science fiction film which is much more concerned with story and themes than it is with spectacle, the special effects in the film are still very impressive for a film made with only a mid-sized budget. It's estimated budget of US$30million is pretty meagre for a film with CGI characters (as a point of comparison, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, released in the same year, had an estimated budget of around US$200million). The computer generated prawns look very lifelike and interact believably with the real life actors.
One thing I will note though, for a film which has at its core a message of racial tolerance, the Nigerian characters are shown in a rather derogatory light. I don't know enough about African national relations to make an informed comment, I just noted that they were looked at almost as inhumanely as the prawns.
A little bit of trivia for you, in South Africa a generic character by the name van der Merwe features in a series of jokes, called 'van der Merwe jokes'. These jokes made fun of the Afrikaner ruling class, as van der Merwe was a reasonably common Afrikaner name, with the van der Merwe in the joke always being a bit of a simpleton. So for a South African audience having this bumbling central character with the surname van der Merwe taps into a existing comic tradition which they would have been well aware of.
District 9 was really the surprise packet of last year. It came out of absolutely nowhere, really only attracting people's attention because Peter Jackson believed in the project enough to allow them to stick his name front and centre on the poster, but seemed to impress everyone who saw it. I was really glad that this picked up a Best Picture nomination at this years Academy Awards, even if it was quite obviously one of the token six through ten nominations., because it's a really clever and original film and really great example of the potential for genres like science fiction to be used to comment on real world issues. After watching it again it must be said that District 9 suffers a bit on the second viewing. Without the element of surprise that came from it's complete obscurity it didn't quite blow me away like it did the first time. But that doesn't mean it isn't great. I'm saying that on second thoughts it might be a four-and-a-half star film rather than a five star film. Regardless it is still an excellent film and here's hoping Blomkamp can back it up with something equally impressive rather than be a flash in the pan.
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