District 9
Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a sci-fi carried out with a mixture of intelligence and emotion, two things often hard to find together in the genre. On the radio last week, Mark Kermode spoke at length on the subject of science fiction and allegory, saying that ‘the best science fiction is about something else’. Although in its context his statement is debatable to say the least, Kermode’s phrase puts rather aptly the central dichotomy of the SF genre – the ‘something else’ is both something unfamiliar, and something familiar hidden in subtext.
It is one of District 9’s strengths (apart from being an exhilarating blend of body horror, action film and a sort mutant buddy movie) that it places the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar. The opening (comprising various clips of wobbly, ‘mockumentary’ footage conducted by a South African news crew) sees a gigantic spaceship hovering a few miles over a very suburban looking Johannesburg. The mixture of the white, picket-fenced houses and the alien leviathan looming above them is accompanied by the type of news footage a post-9/11 audience has become quite used to – the rush of televisual images that appear in the wake of a global event – as the citizens of South Africa are caught up in the furore of the ship’s appearance.
In the narrative within the news footage however, the aliens discovered onboard the ship after the military storm in, are sick and ill, and several thousand are rescued and transferred to the ground, relocated to a shantytown just outside of Johannesburg, known as ‘District 9’. The scenes of the alien arrival gradually segue into documentary footage being filmed nineteen years after their ship appeared. Nearly two decades later, the aliens endure terrible conditions, living in shacks and buying tins of kit-e-kat and raw meat to survive. One very quickly finds oneself viewing with disgust the species that the South Africans derogatorily refer to as ‘prawns’, picking through bins for food and mugging pedestrians for clothes. Their ship still inexplicably hovers above the city, a permanent reminder of their existence. It is here though that one must bear in mind the tagline to the film (somewhat swept aside in that phenomenal teaser campaign the film was marketed with), ‘WHY WON’T WE LET THEM LEAVE?’ The film itself is concerned with the parallels between government official, Wikus van de Merwe, and one of the aliens living in District 9, ‘Christopher’, and his young son (who has eyes so big he could stunt double for a Disney bear), set against the machinations of the irredeemable and self-serving government officials interested in advanced weaponry, and the military potential of an alien/human hybrid technology.As well as making a film that grips hold of its audience from the get-go, and looks stunning (for $5 million less than comedy tool-a-thon, The Hangover, a film that also features advanced weaponry, but of a different kind), Neill Blomkamp has created a film of ideas. The motif is one of blending (appropriate, as the allegory is focused on the South African apartheid era), and the varied results of mixing alien and human. The film does bear the stamp and influence of its executive producer, Peter Jackson, and the body horror is graphic to say the least, carrying some very Bad Taste/Braindead effects, and some Cronenbergian biological horror. Fingernails falling off, scales growing up arms, and the nightmarish vision of half alien, blended human all feature in some of the film’s more gory scenes.
As well as genre bending, uncanny shooting, and some excellent cinematography (the aliens are ugly, but move beautifully, and each shot is carefully considered, perfectly lit, and excellently edited together), the film is, and this might shock you, very emotional. It is Blomkamp’s skill as a writer that he manages to make each alien a separate, rounded character with little more than the scraps of clothing used to differentiate between them. Blomkamp manages to turn a prawn into a protagonist within minutes, and with such skill that you barely notice. Amidst all the flashing lights and machine gunning, MechWarrior-esque action (which, my word, is very enjoyable), is a fairly classic homecoming narrative (done many times before from the opposite perspective, in films like Lost In Space, Stargate, etc), as the ‘prawns’ vie with the South African government to get back to the spaceship that hovers above them. Bearing as much similarity to E.T. as it does to Starship Troopers, the allegory, the uncanniness, the characterisation, and the proficiency with which the film is carried out, all make for something more unique than the sum of its influences. And to be perfectly honest, after the horror that was Transformers 2, you should be grateful. GRATEFUL.
