DISTRICT 9 - Nine Out of Ten Stars

DISTRICT 9 is a small(ish), smart Sci-Fi film, directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, and produced by Peter Jackson. It's basically an Apartheid allegory, cloaked in Sci-Fi trappings. An alien ship appears above Johannesburgh, completely disabled. The South African government cuts its way in, finding all the aliens severely malnourished and dying. It relocates them to a "temporary" resettlement camp that, over the years, turns into a slum. Twenty years later, with tensions at an all-time high, the government plans to move them to a permanent camp outside the city. That's when things go wrong.

SPOILERS LANDING BELOW




















Wikus, a bigoted alien beaurocrat, is put in charge of the eviction process because of his marriage to the daughter of a higher-up at the multinational corporation he works for. Wikus isn't particularly smart or tactful, and his obvious dislike for the aliens comes across. And leads to a lot of unnecessary alien deaths. The script does a fantastic job of making the whole situation feel real. Wikus and the company he works for seem like a real MNC, the way they treat the aliens smacks of condescension, and there's even a whole gang of Nigerians that live in the slum and profit off of exploiting the poor aliens. That's the strong suit of the script -- this feels just like any slum on earth, and the government and MNC's response feels very real.

The best part of the film comes when Wikus gets blasted with some alien goo -- collected from alien junk machinery -- and begins to turn into an alien himself. His company, including his father-in-law, want to kill him and harvest his DNA because there are thousands of alien weapons that are DNA-encoded, and he's the only human who can work them. Wikus has to leave, turn against the company he works for, and evade capture to eventually team up with one of the aliens he oppressed and lead what basically amounts to a revolt effort.

The film's at its most believable and human when we see Wikus turned into an alien and he realizes how shittily he's been treating them. And it's at its most fun when we see Wikus and his alien buddy Christopher blasting dudes with lightning into little chunks with the alien weaponry.

The film is produced very smartly. Most of the film contains VFX of some sort, whether it's shots of the spaceship, the insect-like aliens, or people getting blown up by alien robot, sonic waves, or lightning guns. Because a lot of stock footage is used with aliens/ship effects laid over it, the whole thing was made for a reported $30m. Which makes CLOVERFIELD look positively wasteful by comparison (there were only a few shots of the monster, and they were mostly hidden through smoke).

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. You genuinely feel for Wikus and the aliens and it's a fun ride.

There are, however, some pretty major logic problems with the film. They don't really ruin your enjoyment of the movie, but you do think about them, particularly after it's over.

Chief among them is that the film doesn't explain how the aliens kept hold of so many weapons. If the aliens were so weak and malnourished they could be forcibly resettled without any fight, how do they later come to have hundreds or thousands of rifles (and they're obviously rifles)? How do they have giant exoskeleton attack machines? The film shows the government, MNC, (and Nigerians) want these weapons, and the MNC even runs a top-secret genetic testing program to make alien-human hybrids who can fire the weapons; so why would they let the weapons stay in the hands of the aliens (who resort to selling them for cans of cat food)?

Similarly, when a population is oppressed and downtrodden and they have access to insane firepower, why wasn't there an armed uprising? The film mentions much of the alien leadership died off on the way to earth, but that's not much of an explanation. If you got kicked around for 20 years and hundreds or thousands of your people were killed AND you could explode people with a single shot, you'd go apeshit on them. All you have to do is look at any people in revolt now (Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghanis, etc.) to see the truth of that statement.

It also feels like instead of the big climax being Christopher activating the defunct mothership and going home for reinforcements, there simply could have been a revolt-in-progress, either utilizing the weapons systems onboard the mothership or in the aliens recognzing the activation of their formerly defunct ship and taking up arms against the human oppressors. We saw how a human and an alien with a few guns and one exoskeleton could take out the MNC headquarters and their top mercenaries. Obviously armed aliens could overpower the humans.

Though these are major plot holes, they're small flaws in the overall achievement of what is a smart story deriving from a very unusual take.