'District 9' Review...

Posted on August 14, 2009 - 8:08pm by michael It’s almost impossible not to automatically think of Independence Day or War of the Worlds when you see the enormous alien space ship hovering over Johannesburg in Neill Blomkamp’s new alien film District 9 (produced by Peter Jackson), but the films could hardly be any more different. Independence Day and War of the Worlds were both about massive, global extermination efforts, while District 9 ultimately focuses on the survival of one man and one alien (well, one and a half aliens). Along the way, the movie gets us to take a closer look at the way that we deal with the unknown, and to take notice of some of the crucial deficiencies of military solutions. It’s more like E.T. than War of the Worlds, but with more people getting exploded.

So here’s your 100 words of plot – An alien ship appears hovering over Johannesburg and remains there silently for 3 months. Finally, with the world watching, they break into the ship and find hundreds of thousands of aliens helpless and starving inside. A fenced zone is set up for them, which remains for 20 years before typical slum problems reach critical mass and a decision is made to relocate District 9 farther from the city center.  The clueless beaurocrat assigned to manage the relocation effort is infected with alien DNA and ultimately forced to work with another alien (who, I kid you not, is named Christopher Johnson) to save his own and Christopher's lives before the military can kill them both.

Ok, so I’ve been doing this 100 words of plot thing for about a month now and this is the first time I’ve really had trouble fitting all the details into that one paragraph. There is much more involved in the human - a man named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharito Copley) - getting infected with the aliens’ DNA, for example. Being the only person in human history ever to survive after being infected with alien blood, he becomes the center of the attention for every government and military establishment in the world, who all want to tear him apart and turn him into a weapon. He, of course, just wants his life back.

Oh, and did I mention the aliens’ weapons? This is what a lot of people are going to love most about the movie, these things are awesome. My personal favorite comes up in the third act – it’s like an ED-209 made by aliens, I love it. The weapons, however, are designed to operate only with physical contact with the aliens themselves, which means alien weapons captured by humans are useless. Unless a human happens to have alien DNA running through his veins. You see where this is going?

There is also the matter of an elusive liquid that represents 20 years of alien scientific work. Not many details are revealed about what it is or how it was made, but that’s one of the beauties of alien movies. You can have lots of crazy technology and otherworldly capabilities and stuff like that without really having to explain anything. And believe me, there is plenty in the movie that goes unexplained (like even a scrap of a hint about where the aliens came from in the first place or what was wrong with their ship), but the important thing is that this small amount of liquid is the only hope for curing Wikus before he turns into an alien like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and of allowing the alien Christopher and his son to get back to the mothership. The only problem is that there isn’t enough of the liquid to do both. Oh, and it’s also under massive military guard. And the military is trying to kill both Christopher and Wilkus. So they have a quite a job ahead of them.

As an alien movie District 9 is a resounding success. It’s filmed in a documentary style that is meant to emulate stock footage taken in war zones, which adds a depth of realism generally not common to this kind of science fiction. It’s exactly the same kind of realism that they were going for in Quarantine, except it’s more effective here and more believable. I’m curious about the extensive stupidity attributed to Merwe, who is assigned to head the effort to relocate nearly two million aliens and yet doesn’t know better than to gleefully torch warehouses of their offspring in broad daylight, but he is a believable and likable character and you certainly care about what happens to him, which is crucial.

But here are the things that people won’t like about the movie. Some people just won’t be able to get over the language barrier, first of all. True, the aliens’ language resembles the clicking sounds utilized in certain African languages (watch The Gods Must Be Crazy if you have no idea what I’m talking about), but the rest of their speaking is basically a series of gurgles and belches, and yet they interact with humans as though they’re just having any regular conversation. Granted, the aliens have been around for 20 years by this point, so I’m willing to forgive this point.

Other people will have a problem with the friendship that develops between Christopher and Merwe, or simply the fact that there’s an alien named Christopher. I’m still trying to figure that one out myself. Clearly there are a lot of things that resemble far too closely certain military and sanctioning efforts that have gone on in Africa, and many people might be put off by what is, I’m sorry, a pretty obvious political agenda coiling beneath the surface of the movie. Some things are very specific, such as the obvious references to apartheid, the events that took place in Cape Town’s “District 6,” and the background behind van der Merwe’s name, but overall the movie is basically just reminding us that humans react in not the best ways when confronted with major adversity. This is something that we might like to try to improve.

Personally, however, my biggest gripe with the movie is the horrendous marketing campaign. Surely you’ve seen the ads on the sides of city buses and whatnot that say “This Bus For Humans Only!” I’m sure this sounded like a clever idea when it was first proposed, but I’m sorry, those things are just dumb and the movie deserves much better!

The Bean Meter



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