Township

With hype strong enough to split the atom, “District 9” arrives in South African theatres following a blistering opening in the United States. Not only has it already proven to be a highly profitable film, but the critics adore it. At CHUD, Devin Faraci announced it as one of the best films of its type of the decade (10 out of 10), while HitFix’s Drew McWeeny (aka Moriarty from AICN) likened his experience of the film to watching “Robocop” for the first time. Furthermore, there’s lots of award talk and acclaim for star Sharlto Copley, who makes his acting debut in this film, and deserves every positive comment allocated to his performance.

Before I review the film, I’d like to quickly get this out of the way: “District 9” is not a South African film, just like “Tears of the Sun” is not a Nigerian film and “Black Hawk Down” isn’t a Somali war movie. Like those films, “District 9” is an American movie. It’s directed by Neill Blomkamp, who is South African born and, according to some of the trades, based the move on the apartheid atrocities he’d witnessed. Oh please. Blomkamp is now 29, which means that he started seeing and noticing things outside of his own individual child universe by 1989 or 1990 – two years before Madiba’s release, and a mere four years before South African became a democracy.

But I digress.

“District 9” is produced by Peter Jackson; the effects were mostly handled by a shop in Canada; the film is modelled according to a familiar pattern (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just saying). I repeat, it’s not a South African film – it’s funding is one hundred percent American. Now let’s stop calling it a great South African movie. It’s not South African and it’s no masterpiece.

The highest compliment I can give “District 9” is to call it a solid popcorn movie with a social conscience which employs seamless visual effects and a stunning performance by Copley to tell the story of a pencil pusher put in charge of a dangerous alien relocation program. Blomkamp knows what he’s doing – he probably knows Joseph Camopbell off by heart - and Jason Cope’s work as the prawn(s) is near unbelievable. It’s the kind of SF actioner that effectively adds to the body horror subgenre and ends up being a memorable mainstream cinema experience.

Now, here be spoilers. I assume that you’ve seen the film from this point on.

Wikus gets sprayed with an alien juice in the film’s first act, and you just know the payoff of that scene is close. He starts transforming into a prawn which enables him to use alien weapon technology (which is never used by the aliens themselves? Not even against the Nigerians?) This obviously creates a rift between him and his wife, poorly played by Vanessa Haywood, who sticks out as a sore thumb in the film’s cast. If Blomkamp and cowriter Terri Tatchell had completely cut this character out and made Wikus a bachelor, nothing that is essential to the character or the story would have changed. All in all, I think Blomkamp, who clearly knows his genre, could’ve used a different shot than his current final shot of the now fully transformed Wikus folding metal flowers on a scrapheap. It was almost “Wall-E”-esque, and didn’t quite fit.

For all of its apparent originality, there are still many clichés in “District 9”. For one, there’s the one-dimensional uber-villain who does nothing but grimace and frown and swear. This is the type of character that exists simply for audience gratification and the payoff they experience when he is literally torn to bits by the prawns. The film also uses the “other beings like eating quirky stuff” rule, which here means that the aliens like cat food. Apparently they also like human flesh, so what gives? Why cat food? If you want to make the film more 'South African' – to an extent – why not make them eat marog or pap?

I suspect that the discussions on how good “District 9” actually is will split fanboys from other filmatists. This happened just last year with “The Dark Knight”, where if you for a second let on that it is not The Best Film of All Time, you were verbally assaulted and lambasted for a long while. Usually, fanboys know a lot about Their Film, and they truly dearly love it, but they can’t put it in any kind of context, which is why they can usually foam at the mouth at you when you criticise Their Film, but not much else.

You wish all commercial movie enterprises were made like this: rather cheap but great looking, emotionally involving and with numerous sequel possibilities. The story is simple but quite captivating, starting out in a documentary approach which works like a charm until it’s quietly abandoned for a more straight forward storytelling device where we are aligned exclusively with our hero, Wikus van der Merwe (Copley). It’s a more layered story than anything Emmerich could envision. “District 9” is at times brutal, touching and heroic. Of all the possible comparisons already made, I can’t get past thinking of the film as a distant cousin to Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers”. Things go splat there, too. Much has been made of the film’s social commentary (apartheid, xenophobia) but seeing as the film is not at all subtle about its message, one shouldn’t over emphasise those themes over what happens to Wikus, and how his journey gives new life to the aliens-on-earth SF subgenre.

Do you want to know more? www.wikus.co.za