District 9
Neill Blomkamp (2009)
District 9, a Johannesburg slum, is home to a million extraterrestrials who’ve been stranded on Earth for two decades. Neill Blomkamp’s film, produced by Peter Jackson, is about what happens when the South African government brings in a private military contractor MNU (Multinational United) to relocate this race of arthropod aliens – known derogatorily as ‘the prawns’ (or, more often, in Afrikaner accents, ‘the foo-ken prawns’) to District 10 – an internment camp outside the city. As a taster for this hugely successful sci-fi thriller (which cost $30 million to make and has so far grossed over $200 million at the box office), the BFI screened Alive in Joburg, the 2005 short directed by Blomkamp from which District 9 derives. I think I preferred the six-minute version: for a good half-hour of District 9 it seemed to be an expansion of the Alive in Joburg – but an expansion in the sense of increased detail rather than enlargement of themes (the apartheid connotations of the material are clear enough even in the short film). Alive in Joburg is made as a faux-documentary and Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, are pretty disciplined in the use of this format in the early stages of District 9. The format is also absorbing (and, in my very limited experience, original) in the way it shows television news presenting the aliens. But once the central character is infected by a fluid he discovers in the dwelling of one of the prawn families that he’s trying to evict and he starts mutating into a prawn, Blomkamp departs abruptly from the documentary framework.
I could accept as dramatic licence the shift to scenes taking place outside the spoof-documentary (an essentially similar shift seems to me to occur, much less explicitly of course, in The Hurt Locker). The disappointment is in the fact that, as soon as the narrative reverts to something more conventional, the characters and themes of District 9 immediately follow suit. The story never flags and the picture is technically accomplished and exciting (and, for all I know, inventive) – but, as usual in sci-fi, all the talent seems to have gone into technique at the expense of interesting ideas. The film itself mutates – into the usual stuff. There’s the heartwarming father-son love between an alien and his offspring, the affably clueless protagonist who becomes a physical and a moral hero. Aliens turn out to be smarter than the humans expect – and reasonably want, given how nasty virtually all the humans are, to get away from Earth as fast as possible. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the documentary tightness will break down: even while it’s being maintained, the main character, Wikus van de Merwe, sticks out like a sore thumb, long before he starts sustaining injuries much worse than that. Wikus is the middle-ranking bureaucrat who’s put in charge of the alien relocation programme (his father-in-law is a director of MNU). As played by Sharlto Copley, he’s a caricature of clumsy, by-the-book ineffectuality; he seems a race apart from the realistically-played family members and former colleagues whom we see in brief interviews talking about Wikus. Copley (who produced Alive in Joburg) is more effective once he’s mired in the gorily kinetic action sequences of the second half of District 9: he stays vividly human as he’s metamorphosing. (He doesn’t need the occasional lines the script keeps supplying to remind us that he’s still the engaging no-hoper he was at the start.)
It’s one of the achievements of District 9 that the carnage and destruction it moves towards and keeps ratcheting up never seems hollow the way it does in, say, Avatar: the killing of the prawns continues to seem to matter. (I say that in spite of the evidence that some of the NFT2 audience really enjoyed the spectacular bloodshed: you could hear laughter above a soundtrack which is close to deafening much of the time.) And, even though there’s a lowering correspondence between the film’s misanthropy and the relentless trashing of people and extraterrestrials and buildings and vehicles, this does give a powerful dimension to a conventional theme. At one level, the horror of losing your humanity is realised in purely physical terms as Wikus finds his body parts disintegrating and decaying, new and alien bits sprouting (again as often in sci-fi, this is visually horrible rather than intellectually horrifying). But at another level, we end up wondering – given how vile Neill Blomkamp shows people as being – whether humanity is worth hanging onto anyway. (There’s a two-sided racist element to this: like it or not, white South Africans have a head start in embodying vileness for international audiences; Nigerians, as presented by Blomkamp and Tatchell, don’t come off much better here.) The final shot of a completely metamorphosed Wikus is ambiguous – and may be a peg to hang a sequel on in due course. But his eventual fate doesn’t feel like an entirely unhappy ending.
4 May 2010