This is a good-weird movie and was totally unexpected, at least by me. The more I think about what I watched the other night the more I think I shouldn’t have enjoyed it so much, it was after all almost a buddy-cop movie featuring a South African version of Murray from Flight of the Conchords, and an alien being that looks like a cockroach.
I’ll give you a second to think about that sentence….
Still with me? Hanging out to see it now?
Probably not, but it is pretty good nonetheless.
I think I like the film more because the filmmakers play what is happening down, there is no “How cool is this? An alien!” stuff, rather the goings on are quite obviously a parallel of the reality of parts of Africa, with alien life forms conveniently subbing for indigenous Africans (or African-Africans as I like to call them. Not really.) and the white guys playing the oppressing white guys.
Now that you know it is about aliens I will tell you it really isn’t, this film could have been made with humans as the oppressed, but they rightfully went with aliens in the end to differentiate this flick from the pack.
The movie starts with a simple montage showing an alien ship arriving and “parking” itself in the sky above Johannesberg, and while the news reports mock the fact that it didn’t choose a US city to hover over menacingly I still refuse to believe that Americans wouldn’t get involved somehow whether they were invited or not, but from memory there isn’t a Yank in the film. Over the coming years after their arrival the aliens integrate into South African society, as much as an 8 foot cockroach/prawn creature can in any case, but before they can say “Is it because I is Black?” they are shuffled of into what are more or less internment camps until something can be done with them…. And this is where the main part of District 9 starts.
The movie proper starts out as almost a documentary, at least in the first half until “things happen”, from which point it muddies the waters by being part doco, part film and part fly on the wall, when they actually use security camera footage to show what is happening at times.
In the opening sequences we are introduced to an unassuming guy named Wikus, I mentioned above that he looks and acts a lot like the band manager Murray from FotC and in the early scenes he does, though as the film progresses he must necessarily adapt to vastly changing circumstances. Early though he is a little nervous around the camera but seemingly proud to be addressing it nonetheless.
It turns out Wikus has been placed in charge of implementing a “Plan B” for what to do with the alien visitors, which they disparagingly refer to as “Prawns”, it also seems evident that Wikus is initially a little out of his depth but has landed the job thanks to the nepotism and pull of his Father in Law. (Wikus is also a prime example of someone “Batting above his average”, not that his wife is a supermodel, but Wikus sure ain’t Brad Pitt.)
Long story short the plan is to move the Prawns from their current poverty stricken conditions into what is purported to be a far more comfortable camp, which is basically a new poverty stricken squatter’s camp just further away from Johannesberg. The mission is co-ordinated by Wikus and crew, and chaperoned by the ever-cordial South African army, who always appear a second away from pulling the trigger regardless of how co-operative their captives are. The Prawns are generally not very helpful, but can be bribed into doing almost anything for a can of cat-food. They also have powerful weapons at their disposal, only the weapons are far too advanced for human use as they are linked to the creature’s DNA.
The early 20-30 minutes are tough going, Wikus and crew proceed through the camp handing eviction notices to baffled and surly aliens who speak with a click (and have their dialogue suitably subtitled) but nothing really happens, and the only thing that keeps you watching is that you start plotting the variables:
– the Aliens will fire up and eradicate the soldiers
– the soldiers will lose patience and annihilate the Aliens
– more Aliens arrive to destroy Earth
– in any case Wikus and friends are largely fu**ed.
And so on and so forth, after all we’re dealing with an Alien life-force here, once we take the leap that it could be true anything is possible. What actually happens won’t be revealed here, but it does involve Alien and human scuffles, a lot of action and the usual suspects of betrayal, deceit and good old fashioned attempted genocide.
Thanks to Gollum I think it is acknowledged now that CGI creatures can fit into a film’s cast without standing out like sore thumbs, and after the first few glimpses of the Prawns they simply become a seamless part of the landscape, interacting with the environment and other characters in a way that isn’t noticeable for any bad reasons. This leads me to give a big thumbs up to the guy that plays Wikus, as for a large part of the film he is acting alongside what must have been a stick with a tennis ball for a head until they could add the final computer generated imagery required, and he still comes across as believable and suitably more and more desperate as his situation demands.
Once the action actually finally starts it builds slowly but surely until a frantic final 15 minutes, complete with a great many exploding bad guys, massive weaponry and the introduction of some pretty serious machinery and vehicles. As mentioned before it takes a while to get to this point, and I have a mate who went to the cinema and lost patience, walking out about half way through, I would argue that he had done the hard yards and must have been close to the action heating up to reward his effort.
I’m still not sure that I could be convinced to watch District 9 again in the near future, I’m not sure why as I enjoyed it a lot and thought it had a lot of pluses. In any case I really think it is at least worth watching once, and wait until the end before you write it off.
Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. While this is not a film that needed a strong finale to redeem the first half, it is definitely the final 30 minutes that you’ll remember.