BY COLIN ENQUIST
Neill Blomkamp had a vision and it started with the 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg (our SiM Short Film of the Month this month!). His vision may have been complete (or at least put on the backburner) since Peter Jackson tapped Blomkamp on the shoulder to direct a film based on the highly successful video game, Halo. Sadly that project fell apart. Jackson has stated that “the day Halo died, District 9 was born”. Blomkamp and Jackson believed they could make a feature film based off the 6 minute short film (one of the most expensive short films ever made). District 9 was the end result.Based entirely in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, alien creatures live in the slums of District 9. Nobody knows why they came to our world. MNU (Multi-National United), the massive corporation vying for the alien technology has been given the task of relocating the lobster like creatures 200 miles away from District 9. The humans living in and around Johannesburg do not like the aliens, dubbing the aliens with a new racial term, “prawns”. The film has an eerie parallel to the 1966 forced removal of 60, 000 people in District Six (which was a residential are in Cape Town, South Africa) to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away. When an MNU worker Wikus van der Merwe (Shartlo Copley) comes into contact with a biological alien liquid he starts to transform. Instantly he becomes of enormous value to MNU because the alien weaponry they are trying to duplicate only works with an alien (specifically there DNA) behind the trigger. Now van der Merwe is on the run and hides in the place he hopes MNU will look last, District 9.
Blomkamp opens the film in a documentary style and hammers us with loads of information. Our entire understanding of what the aliens can and can not do is told through the first 30 minutes. Using the hand held camera is always a stroke of genius or fails miserably. Sadly District 9 has a little too much of it. Although it works extremely well at the beginning of the film it tends to be overused later where the camera shakes so much that it is dreadfully tough to follow. The shaky camera is not helped by the quick cuts Blomkamp utilizes throughout the entirety of the film.
On a $30 million dollar budget, you never can tell what is or is not CGI effects. Movies like X-Men Origins: Wolverine could learn a great deal from Blomkamp and this film. The disgusting looking aliens are almost identical at a quick glance but they are all drastically different. Most of the aliens show no intelligence, unless they are finding new ways to get cat food, except for one alien (known as Christopher Johnson by MNU) who wants to save his son and get his entire race off our world. This is when we start to see the aliens of District 9 in a new light. Showing a full range of emotional body language, Christopher Johnson helps van der Merwe on his suicidal quest that could save the aliens and cure himself.Act one and two are utterly fascinating, probably the most original film about aliens in many years. Sadly act three turns into your generic action film. I do give Blomkamp credit though. A fully expected a car(s) to explode for no reason when tossed in the air, coming down with a load crash, but it never came. I applaud him for not reverting to pointless explosions to grab a viewer’s attention.
The ingenuity the film had going for the first two acts had me thinking I was watching something truly special. A lacklustre finish though destroyed the films chances of being in the upper echelon of science fiction films. I do hope we get a sequel but this movie completely answers the questions they set out to ask. If Blomkamp and Jackson return for another go around, then so will I.
3.5 out of 5
