Chattanooga Pulse

Never mind marketing, the trailers—or what you might think about the film. District 9 isn’t about aliens coming to earth. It’s about our reactions, and our prejudices, and our selfishness. It’s about racism, greed, and bigotry. It’s about humanity.

The premise is simple: A solitary transport ship comes from the stars to settle in one mile above Johannesburg, South Africa. A nation with a checkered past when it comes to race relations, the South African government appears to do what it does best: set up a ghetto.The starving, weakened aliens are corralled into a shantytown known as District 9, where they are fed cat food, denigrated with racial slurs (“Prawns”) and generally lead sad lives of poverty and shame.

Then you have Wikus Van De Merwe (played by South African newcomer Sharlto Copley). He’s your typical white-bread middle manager, charged with moving the “Prawns” from the District 9 shantytown into the District 10 concentration camp far away from Johannesburg. Unfortunately for this condescending, passive-aggressive racist, he is infected by a biological weapon that is slowly transforming him into “one of them.”

Most of the time, when you hear that premise, you think, “Oh, he’s going to be ‘one of them’ and become a mindless killing machine.” In truth, the mindless killing machines in this film are white guys in private defense contractor uniforms. Wikus’s transformation makes him considerably more human, and he must to come to terms with humanity’s seemingly limitless potential for allowing greed to obliterate our morality.

However, District 9’s greatest accomplishment is communicating this message without being weighted down by it. Tons of credit goes to Copley for his lighthearted, sarcastic and hopeful performance, and even more goes to his eventual alien ally “Christopher”, who demonstrates more humanity than half the humans in the movie.

From a cinematography standpoint, the movie is beautiful. Although this probably shouldn’t weigh on my analysis, the movie was produced for only $30 million, but the effects look like they should have cost ten times that.

It’s clear that Peter Jackson had a hand in the production of the film, as the alien performances had more in common with Gollum than JarJar. Jackson’s second intelligent decision was selecting South African director Neill Blomkamp to helm the film.
Blomkamp clearly takes a page from the Jackson school of cinematography, carefully matching practical visual effects with computer graphics to make both appear more realistic. Keep an eye on Blomkamp—he’s got the goods.

Additionally, it was very refreshing to have Johannesburg as the setting of District 9. It’s a place I’ve never seen (and really, still haven’t), but it’s an arresting place to set a movie like this. If this were a Hollywood film, the aliens would have landed in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, and the personalities of those cities would have stifled the spirit of this movie. There’s just something about the insincere joviality of the people of Johannesburg (with their odd colonial accents) that adds an unjustified credibility to their racism. They’re bigots—but they’re friendly.

The surprising part is that the film lived up to my expectations. These days, whenever you see a yearlong marketing campaign for a movie, you can pretty much rest assured about just how horrible it will be. Oddly enough, most films’ marketing intelligence is inversely proportionate to the intelligence of the film itself. In the case of District 9, the marketing was exceptionally representative, without giving away the farm. In fact—I just realized—I’ve put more spoilers into this review than the trailers for the film. When’s the last time you saw that happen?

On that note, let’s wrap this up. Go see District 9. It’s really good.

District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt
Rated R
Running time: I hour, 53 minutes