District 9 Review
by Alex Hill
How often is the biggest blockbuster of the week also an incredible, unflinching look into real social and political crises, seen through the inventive lens of science fiction? When was the last #1 movie at the box-office also a film of truth, un-manufactured, warts-and-all? Based on a short film, District 9 looks at first contact in a way few if any other examples of fiction dared to entertain. The extra-terrestrials are advanced, but starving, desperate refugees that need us a lot more than we need them. They are fearsome, and feared, and amazingly both sides are to blame for this. It is not a movie with easy-answers or a dime-store ending. It is not about solutions, but of our passive treatment for what we don’t understand, and a struggle through the muck we often provide.
This is not a movie with a black and white philosophy, which might at first seem ironic given its subtext. Even the characters we root for have their ugly sides. “Wikus van der Merwe” (Sharlto Copley) is in charge of evicting these bipedal crustaceans out of one intolerable hellhole and into another. Things don’t go as planned. Bodies pile up on his watch. Sometimes his armed accompaniment are at fault, sometimes the residents of the slum are uncooperative. It is not a pretty film, but scattered in the filth are rare moments of forlorn beauty.
Wikus is at times friendly and level-headed, sometimes naive and sometimes a doofus. And sometimes he is as heartless and beurocratic as this film’s monstrous antagonists(and I’m not referring to the “Prawns”). Just ten minutes in he has ordered and overseen atrocities not merely with a straight face, but with a grin and a chuckle and a sick sense of fascinated excitement. He learns his lesson, but oh, he learns it the hard way. It takes brutal episodes of inhumanity for him to see that the life given to these new residents on Earth is not justified. Yes, the aliens are often reduced to scavenging beasts in the wastelands. What else do you expect? Look at their living conditions. You cannot consistently, mercilessly treat a living, thinking being like an animal and then expect it to act civilized. Nor can you expect a cornered animal not to bare its fangs.
When Wikus and everyone else starts to notice he’s got more in common with the aliens than when he started, he is stripped of his humanity. Now the shoe is on the other prong. He then must rely on an alien with a bizarrely un-alien name: “Christopher Johnson”. He and his little insectoid son become Wikus’ only allies, and make a pact: Wikus will get him fuel for his space-ship if Chris can reverse the biological metamorphosis taking hold of him. Because we are given time with these characters, because this film has patience, and because we see them in a personal light, the scenes where these three strangelings are thrust into danger are given weight. The stakes are always higher when I give a damn about who’s in the crossfire, and I tell you I gave a good god damn about Chris and his son. And even Wikus.
Does this film compromise itself with the action-heavy last act? I don’t think so. In a movie like this, violence is unavoidable. A lot of characters get what’s coming to them. The loathsome circumstances are given all of the attention they deserve, more than lesser filmmakers would have allowed. This is a shocking, sometimes gruesome, sometimes heart-wrenching movie. I wouldn’t call the scenes of bloodshed glorified. There are honest and deadly repercussions here. This is not a toy-commercial.
Nor is it a recreation of the events of District Six, a very-real place and situation involving many people bulldozed out of their homes in South Africa. How could it be? What it does is echo the shattering instances like that, where greed and fear of the unknown work in tandem to cloud our ability for human compassion. The Prawns don’t represent any one specific race, but any group of people forced to live without even the luxury of squalor. It is handled intelligently, and looks at its events through many different angles of observation, many of them not without merit. District 9 is about the sad outrage that comes from only realizing everything you really have when you no longer have it. And when you realize that many people never have it.
Roger Ebert wrote a fine review for it, but believes it does not belong to the high annals of science fiction. I think the best fiction resonates and reflects so much of what’s regrettably, agonizingly real. Here is a movie not content to bludgeon the point or the action into its audience. Its makers are incapable of making forgettable popcorn entertainment. They aimed higher. In spite of a misstep here and there, they hit their target. This is what a real fucking movie is about.
If it weren’t for Fox, Universal and Microsoft, I would be saying all of this about Halo. If any series needed Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson to give it some dignity, there you go. But as far as consolation prizes go, District 9 is one of the best.
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~A.H.
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