Looking Too Much into District 9

I'm in Vancouver! Alas, too busy holidaying to write much, and the battery on my computer lasts under three hours, so even on long trips I can't write much.

The plane journey, by the way, had a decent selection of films. Not being an idiot, I opted not to watch The Proposal, My Life in Ruins, or 17 Again, but (re)watched Jackie Brown, In the Loop, and (for the first time) saw Adventureland, which is decent but should not be advertised as a comedy. I also started State of Play, confirming that it's not nearly as good as the miniseries it's based on, but the plane landed before it finished.

Also I saw Up in a three-dollar theatre in the delightful city of Portland and it turned me into a giant girl. Review to come.

Review!!!

District 9

It’s a subversion of the typical alien invasion movie. Set not in an American metropolis, but Johannesburg. With aliens that are neither unstoppable and malevolent nor good and wise, but, rather, lost and confused. With a hero who is not a muscle-bound action hero, a wise-cracking pretty boy, or a beautiful but deadly woman, but a character whose nearest cultural touchstone is Murray from The Flight of the Conchords. Using, for a significant chunk of the film, a documentary aesthetic. Here we have a film that turns so many sci fi tropes upside down that it should be brilliant. It isn’t.

District 9 takes us to Johannesburg, twenty years after an enormous spaceship began hovering over the city. Inside the ship were about a million alien creatures, lost and starving. In the city, they were met with hostility, and moved into a huge slum: the District 9 of the title. An initiative has begun to relocate the creatures (or, as a speciesist term would have them, “prawns”) to a new, cleaner slum, hundreds of kilometers from the city. Wikus Van Der Merwe (Sharto Copley) is the hapless middle-manager type, and CEO’s son-in-law, charged with heading up the operation of getting the aliens out of District 9.

As mentioned, the first section of the film is set up like a documentary. We have interviews with Wikus and others involved with the relocation, as well as experts and lecturers on the aliens. The footage seems to come from some unknown crew interviewing people; from news broadcasts; from people within Wikus’s corporation filming; from CCTV footage. As the story develops, the film does away with the documentary style, switching to straight narrative. The story goes to places a documentary could not, so, little by little, it is abandoned. Here is the catch 22 of the film: the documentary is the most successful part of it, and it is what undermines it.

A documentary style – even a fake documentary style – suggests realism. Its aim is to make you believe in what you are seeing, and make you relate to a film set up as pure fiction. There are things that might be excusable in an ordinary film that documentary style films cannot get away with, because they’ve told you they’re real. Take the creatures themselves. They are designed to be somewhat grotesque – very well designed, it must be noted – and, yes, alien. But they are simply too human. They might resemble walking prawns, but they have arms and legs; they stand upright; they have recognizable eyes, and mouths that they eat with and talk and vomit out of, and they urinate from the same place humans do. We are asked to identify with the aliens, so of course they had to have recognizable features. But for creatures from another planet to have evolved so similarly to humans? It’s too much to take. So too are the films other contrivances; the plot conveniences that occur too easily, to move the story forward. An ordinary sci-fi thriller could get away with these things, but not one that is, even in part, presented as a documentary. Furthermore, the way the documentary style is discarded makes it seem as if its purpose was not social commentary, or realism, or satire, but an easy way to get mass amounts of exposition onto the screen, as if it were too difficult for ordinary dialogue to set up more than twenty years of history, so direct-to-camera interviews were used instead.

Things get worse once the film crosses into pure action territory. The action itself isn’t directed with enough drive or tension. It also, like executive producer Peter Jackson’s early work, moves towards over-the-top, gross-out violence. Alien weapons used make things and people blow up, and the film asks us to enjoy seeing people explode into goo. This splatter comedy is incongruous with the documentary section of the film, even though it doesn’t occur until we’re watching an action movie, complete with mismatched buddies and a precocious and tech-savvy child. This is the film’s final downfall. What started out so different – if flawed – ends up in a place no different to any other action movie. The end of the movie is open, yes, but that feels less like shunning convention and more like setting up a follow-up film.

It’s not without merit. Copley does fine work, playing for both laughs and pathos. For this to be his first acting role is a feat. The apartheid commentary is, despite being a little heavy handed, is a worthy enough message. The animation, too, is very good, especially for the thirty million dollar budget. Director Neill Blomkamp shows promise; with tighter direction of action sequences, could yet make something great. This is not that film. This has not changed the face of sci fi cinema. Perhaps we can hold out hope for the obvious sequel.

4/10

Totally alone in that opinion. There must be something I'm missing here. It wasn't just a film that didn't live up to its huge hype, though. It was just flat-out not very good.