Hallelujah! Now this is what I’m talking about!

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp, opens with a summary of what has happened over that last 30 years, beginning with mankind’s first contact with aliens. The viewer will immediately notice that this movie is stylistically reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and lots of other cinéma vérité films of which you’ve never heard. On television this documentary shooting style is all the rage. From The Office to COPS to The Hills (my personal favorite), it’s all over the fuckin’ place. I’m not complaining, though. I love the added sense of realism. You may recall in my G.I. Joe review I went on about the brainfuck that is watching a movie set in the real world, yet, left and right the laws of physics are being raped, plot-holes abound, and everyone looks like the offspring of Pamela Anderson and the Greek god Apollo. This movie doesn’t have any of that nonsense.

In the first few minutes we are shown footage of a massive alien ship hovering above the city of Johannesburg, which leads me to the first distinguishing element of this movie: the setting. It’s rare, especially in this day and age, for a science fiction film to take place in a city that many Americans have barely heard of and can most certainly NOT locate on a map. The setting choice was not intended to mess with American minds, however; there are reasons behind it. One is the fact that Blomkamp was born there. But more important is the city’s role in Apartheid, for which this movie serves as an allegory.

I actually have here a 100% authentic transcript of a conversation between Neill Blomkamp and the movie’s original producer, Jerry Bruckheimer*:

Neill: So the movie takes place in Johannesburg…

Jerry: Johannesburg, Johannesburg… is that a suburb of New York or LA?

Neill: Neither, it’s, uh, actually the largest city in South Africa.

Jerry: There are cities in Africa?

Neill: Well, yes, actually…

Jerry: So you’re saying the movie opens in Africa. Great! Maybe we could fade in to a close up of a black bushman with an authentic-looking bone through his nose and holding a feathered spear. It’ll be an awesome contrast to the next scene where a caravan of U.S. Army trucks comes crashing through the brush and starts blowing the shit out of some African dictator’s palace! And then we cut to Washington D.C. – the camera will circle around the Washington Monument and the Capitol building a couple times and…

Neill: No, actually, it doesn’t just open in Africa. The whole movie takes place in Johannesburg. We never show Washington D.C. In fact, there’s no mention of America really…

Jerry: Awesome, awesome. And then the mother ship hovers over Washington D.C. and… wait, no we can’t do that — Independence Day already did that. We need a different location…

Neill: Right, like I said, it takes place in…

Jerry: How about Boston? No, no. My hometown of Detroit? Hey we could save a bunch of cash shooting in Detroit! Would anyone care if Detroit blows up, though? No, probably not. Maybe Chicago? Did Independence Day do Chicago? Someone get me a copy of Independence Day Goddamnit!

Neill: We don’t actually blow up the city in the mov…

Jerry: SOMEONE GET ME A COPY OF FUCKING INDEPENDENCE DAY!!

Neill: *facepalm*

*Jerry Bruckheimer was not the original producer. I made that up. You may also be surprised to learn that I made up this entire conversation. Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t even really talk like that. But who cares about facts. I don’t!

I’m not a crazy Peter Jackson fan by any means, but thank God he produced this.

The movie’s main protagonist is Wikus Van De Merwe, played wonderfully by Sharlto Copley. Wikus (pronounced Vikus) seems like a rather ordinary guy. He has a nice wife and a good job at Multi-National United (MNU), the “global leader in technology adaptation and integration”. We meet him just as he’s been promoted and will be leading a team into an alien Soweto called District 9. But as we follow him (still documentary-style) into what looks like any real-world shanty town you’ve ever seen, we start getting the impression that Wikus is actually kind of a schmuck.

His job is to go door-to-door serving eviction papers to the alien inhabitants. They are to be relocated to an internment camp (which, later on, we learn is called District 10) where they’ll live in tiny white tents, 100 miles outside of Johannesburg. It would seem that the people of the city are sick of these non-human pests who are referred to pejoratively as “prawns”*.

* which are essentially shrimp, but you probably knew that.

Even though he knows the future that awaits the prawns, Wikus is very casual, and even excited about the work he’s doing. When he discovers weapons in some prawn homes, he’s practically glowing. He laughs and jokes and even brings one of the more impressive weapons outside to excitedly show off.

Some have criticized the movie for this. They say that it lacks a hero to root for; it lacks someone we can relate to. I find this criticism to be… well… retarded.  We can most certainly relate to him.  This is the second element — after its visual style — that distinguishes District 9. This man is quintessentially human: he’s full of contradiction, hypocrisy; he’s endearingly scant; he’s selfish; he’s a lover who will do whatever it takes to be with his wife; he’s prejudiced; he has times of weakness and times of surprising strength. This is not a static, one-dimensional live-action cartoon character. This is not Channing Fucking Tatum’s Duke.

See, he’s not really a schmuck per se. He’s a man behaving exactly as you’d expect him to, given his race, his species, where he lives, his economic class, and having the job he does.  It’s wrong, of course, but contrary to what you may have been led to believe, people often don’t go through the day commenting on the injustices of their time. Most people are thinking of numero uno – themselves — and, specifically, how they’re going to make a few bucks today so that they can live their life tomorrow at some level of comfort.

We hear Wikus joking with some of his soldiers about shooting an alien child. He simply doesn’t see these prawns as equals to humans. It’s natural, real, awful, often times intrinsic, human racism (or speciesism?). “Family-friendly” kitsch like G.I. Joe has indoctrinated in us and enforced the belief that people are either “good” or “evil”. Only Destro or Cobra Commander could joke about shooting the child; only “bad guys” see others as beneath them.

The second protagonist is an alien and his name is Christopher Johnson. I love this name. The writers might have gone the traditional route and maybe garnered a few laughs by calling him Gleekax Zorkaz or something ridiculously “alien” sounding. But, again, realism prevailed. Giving this huge, shrimp-like alien a white, English moniker reminds one of Polish immigrants at Ellis Island: Alfons Sochaczewski becomes Alan Smith. Or maybe you’ve called for tech support and gotten a dude on the other end that sounds strikingly similar to Apu from The Simpsons, yet assures you his name is Kevin.

Chris is more intelligent than your average prawn and has hatched a plan to return to his home world. A strange black fluid that he has spent 20 years collecting is the key to this. But unfortunately the fluid falls into the hands of none other than Wikus, who’ll soon pay dearly for taking District 9 so lightly. We’re about a half hour into the movie when the back fluid spurts into his face and things start getting ugly. At first it seems like no big deal. He wipes it off, tells the cameraman to cut that part out, and continues on. But it doesn’t take long for him to realize that something’s wrong. He vomits, becomes pale and sickly, black fluid leaks out of his nose. He starts losing teeth and fingernails. It’s basically what happened to me after Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

These are the modest beginnings of the gore, which is prolific from here on out, but never what I’d call excessive. I mean, people explode and stuff — actually, LOTS of people explode — but the gore isn’t too crazy other than that. Except for that part when Wikus tries to cut off his hand with a dirty axe. That was cringeworthy. The scene with the gangsters eating the prawn to get its power was kind of disturbing too, I guess. There was also the dude’s head getting ripped off, but that was cool.

I won’t give away what’s happening to Wikus, but from here the documentary-style shifts to a more traditional third-person perspective. This was necessary because the writers/director would have needed to jump through some insane hoops to tell the story they wanted to tell and still manage to “capture it all on tape”. While I don’t really mind the documentary approach, some people I’ve spoken to have suggested that they wouldn’t have enjoyed the movie nearly as much if it had continued, so it’s probably good that they made the shift rather than going for the long hall ala Cloverfield.

The movie gets more and more exciting as it progresses and I found myself vigorously rooting and fearing for the protagonists. By the end we’ve watched Wikus grow into someone just a little more heroic than we ever expected him to be. I contrast this with G.I Joe, during which I never felt much of anything. Well, nothing emotional. I felt mildly nauseated, and there was a strange pressure in my head which I think was my brain expanding from exposure to an intellectual vacuum, similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bug-eyes in Total Recall* when he ends up on the Martian surface without a space suit.

* “Come on Cohagen, you got what you want. Give deese people aiyah!”

But seriously, the characters in G.I Joe couldn’t become heroic because they were already branded as “heroes” or “villains” from the very beginning. The only character in that movie that changed – The Baroness — didn’t really change at all. Her mind was being controlled by the bad guys. As soon as the mind control was removed she was “good” again. Heaven forbid she grows through experience and changes by her own will! The fuckin’ kids will never understand!

The ending leaves the movie wide open for a sequel and of course there’s been talk of one. No big surprise, especially given the box office take. District 9, as of this writing, has made $73 Million. And get this: it only cost $30 million to make! It has made over twice its budget in the first two weeks! My other favorite movie, G.I. Joe, has yet to make a profit!

I must say, they squeezed some crazy special effects out of that budget. I have to eat crow and take back the swipe I made at WETA in my G.I. Joe review. The effects were pretty impressive. The prawns, ships and alien weaponry all looked sufficiently real. I don’t know if it came from the director or the effects designers, but I found it interesting that they gave the prawns mammalian eyes rather than insect or crustacean. I have to assume it was a way of making creatures that are anything but human in appearance just a little bit more sympathetic. Good move, in my opinion (not that they really give a shit).

I do have a few gripes. I feel like an asshole for mentioning them, but this is a review and I need to be objective (HA!). When it came to escaping from hairy situations, the filmmakers tended to fall back on some weak, traditional film practices. Whenever Wikus was about to get his self blown up or shot or cut to pieces, a savior in some form would show up at the very last second and rescue him. I’m thinking of the scene with the Nigerian gangsters – the scene when the leader wants to eat his arm. Earlier in the movie we saw the gangsters backstab and start chowing down on one of the aliens without a moment’s hesitation. But in the scene with Wikus, an eternity seemed to pass between the order to kill him and his acquirement of the alien gun, which he then used to blast them all away.

Near the end Wikus is being taken away in MNU trucks. He is on his way to meet certain death. But then the same gangsters he escaped from earlier show up and “save” him. There’s also the scene at the very end with the main villain, Koobus Venter (played by David James). I won’t go into detail about it but it just supports the argument that, in a movie that is a celebration of fictional realism, Wikus’ luck is a little unbelievable.

Those are really the only complaints I have.

I’m going to end this review with a table of analogies across multiple categories that will hopefully get the point across about how much better District 9 is than G.I. Joe.