District 9 Movie Review

District 9

Movie Review

Remember THAT scene in Alien? John Hurt laughs and enjoys a drink with his crew mates, little realising that he has taken part in the sci-fi world's answer to the Deliverance. Suddenly, a fetal alien bursts from his chest to wreak it's acid-soaked wrath upon the surviving inhabitants of the Nostromo. It's one of those cinematic images that melds itself to the frontal lobe, like the shower scene in Psycho or the Statue of Liberty reveal in Planet of the Apes; quite hard to forget. Now, cast your mind back to what Alien did for science fiction heading into the eighties, giving the old Star Wars paradigm a much needed hug in the facial department. Well, the naughties now have their own version of that genre busting whip-livener in the shape of District 9, a rending tale of alien xenophobia set in a post-apartheid South Africa.

The documentary-style narrative follows Wikus van de Merwe, an employee of MNU, which is a private contractor to the South African government. As the movie opens, he is celebrating a recent promotion, having been given control of an illegal alien camp relocation. This is where this version of earth's reality skews of from our own, as the aliens in this camp come from a little further afield than other African nations. They are intergalactic refugees, having been stranded when their mammoth spacecraft stalled over Johannesburg roughly twenty years before the events of the movie. There are no signs of intelligent life on board, and the working-class lifeforms inhabiting the ship need to be cut free and extricated.

Their less than hospitable hosts place the alien creatures in temporary accommodation which quickly becomes a run down slum. The life forms (“Prawns” as they are derisively called – you can see why from the above picture) don't do themselves any favours either. They're generally uncouth; eating raw meat and cat food, and stealing from the local population to fund their prodigious consumption of same.

Now, Wikus is a nice guy. He has a wife (who, honestly, is far too hot for him), and is a pretty happy go lucky chap. But he's under immense pressure to clear the camp from his father-in-law, who got him the job. Additionally, he seems to have little or no regard for the prawns, and treats them with a lack of humanity. All that begins to change though when he is sprayed by a strange liquid during a routine search of a prawn shack.

District 9 started life as a short film, developed by director Neil Blomkamp. He was in the process of developing his first feature film, an adaptation of the Halo video game series with [LOTR-link] guru Peter Jackson, when the project was shelved for lack of financing. Instead, they chose to develop the short, originally entitled Exile in Joburg, into a full length movie.

The film itself draws from different sci-fi and horror tenets. Part Blair Witch shockumentary, with a little David Cronenburg body horror mixed in, it uses small parts of these genres to quickly and compactly build its complex and engaging plot. The first two acts are spring loaded with so much exposition and action that it is a testament to the quality of the script to say that the pacing never feels ragged or jarring as they rapidly unwind.

Sharlto Copley is eminently engaging as Wikus. His initial gleeful mistreatment of the Prawns can be put down to negligent disregard rather than malicious intent, and his arc is perfectly judged, so that there is some real visceral emotion behind his eventual suffering and retaliation. It also doesn't hurt that he sounds like an inner-city Dubliner when he shouts FOOK - copiously - throughout the movie.

The production design and special effects seem to have been sourced in part from another video game, namely the Half-Life series. I would be interested to see what Weta Workshops list of inspirations was, especially for the Prawn battle suit, whose gravity weapon bears more than a passing resemblance to Half-Life 2's gravity gun.

I cannot fault a little cribbing though, because the effect of the Weta treatment is to add enormously to the scale of District 9. I walked out of the movie theatre estimating that the production, with all of it's explosions, alien creatures and giant floating spaceships must have cost in excess of $100 million dollars to make, when a paltry $30 million was the actual expenditure.

It is a sad truth that there will be no major Oscar wins for District 9. Science Fiction films don't tend to go home with many statues. The most it can hope for is a Best Special Effects and Best Original Screenplay nomination and maybe a nod in the Best Foreign Film category. Where this feature will ultimately stand or fall is in the money it makes (already $126 million at the global box office). But, on the evidence of what I have seen here, District 9 deserves to rake in more coin than Raymond Babbitt at a blackjack table.

9/10