District 9 (2009) Review

I’m not going to make many friends with this one.

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson, is based on a 6-minute short film titled “Alive in Joberg”, also directed by Blomkamp (it can be seen here).  Both films depict an alternate reality in which extraterrestrial aliens take the place of black Africans in apartheid-era South Africa.  In D9, in the year 1982, Aliens descended to Earth in a huge mother ship hovering over Johannesburg.  Humans eventually board the ship and discover a horde of malnourished insectoid creatures, whom the humans derogatively call “prawns”.  The South Africans, not knowing what to do with the aliens, place them into a government camp where they live in desolate conditions and are subjected to prejudice from the locals.  At the turn of the 21^st century, a private military company, called the Multinational United (MNU), is called to evict the aliens from District 9 and move them to a new district, which they do by rather violent means.  The story is uniquely told by incorporating mock news and documentary footage to depict the conflict between the prawns and the humans.

And…I have a number of problems with this movie.

Let’s start with the documentary footage, which take up a good 20-30 minutes of the beginning.  While I admire this approach to tell the story, I felt as though there should have been much more of it here.  There is no sense of wonder or discovery with the aliens.  Going by the mock footage, it seems as though the humans put the prawns in the camps and treated them like garbage right after discovering them.  I would liked to have seen an initial interest and respect for the aliens and their technology that evolved into a disdain and disgust for them, but there is no time for the documentary to show this.

And right after the first 30 minutes, the film switches direction and drops the mockumentary gimmick, taking on the traditional third-person camera perspective.  From here on out, the film becomes your usual sci-fi summer blockbuster, complete with all of its well-known, tired clichés.  The writers and the directors should have been more confident in the mockumentary approach, either incorporating it more to better establish the altered universe or even filming the whole movie this way.  As it is, the transition is jarring and unwelcome.

I appreciate the fact that Blomkamp, a South African, is trying to show the horrors of the apartheid through a mainstream sci-fi action movie.  However, I question the effectiveness of replacing “blacks” with “prawns” in this movie.  I don’t see how the switch makes this film any more insightful than if it had just been a historical account of South Africa.  To me, it seemed little more than an excuse to include mechanical suits and high-tech weaponry in the action sequences.  The average moviegoer is not going to connect the abuse of the aliens in this movie with the abuse of the black Africans in the apartheid.

Any attempt to show the triumph of humanity in an inhumane world seems very forced in this film.  The main character, Wikus (played by Sharlto Copley), only changes his initial cruel outlook on the aliens after he begins to transform into one.  He starts to help their cause, but only because they offer to change him back to normal.  There was never really a moment in which he saw the true horror of what he did in the past, which I thought would have been necessary for this film to convey any sort of moral message to the audience.  He is sympathetic to the prawns only because they have means to help him.  Why didn’t he care about them when he was burning their live babies earlier in the film?

I was very disappointed with District 9.  There are so many things that I admired about this film: the documentary approach, the parallels to the apartheid in South Africa, the excellent animation despite its low budget, and the use of unknown actors.  However, the bevy of Hollywood clichés, the numerous plot holes, the contrived tolerance message, and the disconnection between the prawns and the real-life victims really spoiled the whole experience for me.

If I had reviewed this film while it was still out in theaters, I would have given it a light recommendation, if only because the summer of 2009 was not a good time for movies (Transformers 2, anyone?) and this one stood on top of the rest.  Now that it is out on DVD and on Netflix’s instant queue, I would recommend almost any dystopian sci-fi film over this one.  If you’re in the mood for a movie like this, I would recommend the highly underrated Children of Men instead, which has similar themes and a much better narrative.

Rating: 2 Stars

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Production Company: WingNut Films

Running Time: 112 minutes