District 9 (Is The Cat's Pyjamas)

Hey! Guess what! I actually saw a movie less than five years old!

I'd been looking forward to Neill Blomkamp's feature-film debut, a sci-fi that lives up to the overused terms "gritty" and "visceral", since the first trailers came out. For one thing, a sci-fi film not re-making or based on something famous or cult-famous is kind of a novelty these days; for another thing, I'll admit that while I'll always love Star Trek and Babylon 5, I prefer my sci-fi hard and, um, "gritty".

On absolutely no level did District 9 disappoint. I'd even go so far as to say it was worth the $30 (two tickets and bus fare) that it cost my husband and I to go see it in the theatre.

Set in present-day Johannesburg, District 9 seamlessly combines conventional film style with faux-documentary footage to put a genuinely fresh face on the fugitive's story. In the early 80's, after three months of silent waiting, the South African government decided to board a giant alien spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg, and found a legitimate humanitarian (?) crisis - heaps of weak, sick, starving aliens amidst heaps of alien corpses, and removed the lot of them into a refugee camp that quickly degenerated into a slum. The citizens of a freshly post-apartheid Joburg found themselves forced to deal with a truly alien populace while still not really having solved less complicated things like race or tribe relations. The government found themselves with a political and military dream, a refugee population whose treatment only a few fringe NGOs cared about and who brought with them a substantial weapons arsenal. Unfortunately, Prawn (as the people have named them) technology is bioengineered, meaning in theory that only a being with Prawn DNA can use a Prawn weapon. But that hasn't stopped the humans from trying to figure away around that.

Enter Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a goofy, sensitive field agent for Multi-National United, a para-governmental/military body (a fusion of the ATF, INS, and FBI, kind of) created for the purpose of dealing with the Prawns and dissecting their technology. In spite of MNU's vigilant population control, the Prawns have increased in number, and the local are done putting up with these creepy, smelly, wierd, resource-consuming refugees so close to the city limits. The film opens as a documentary on Wikus' big day: he's been appointed to head up the eviction and relocation of the Prawns to a new tent camp two hundred miles away from the city. One of the refugees turns out to have a shack full of contraband technology, and when Wikus accidentally takes a facefull of strange liquid, he starts to sicken and soon one of his arms doesn't match the other - in other words, he begins mutating into a Prawn himself. In MNU's eyes, he's not a sick man but an invaluable resource packed with the DNA that will finally allow them use of Prawn weaponry, and the order is given to harvest him in a manner resulting in his death. Wikus manages to escape, but pursued by MNU agents, physically transformed into an object of hatred, and faced not only with arrest warrants splashed across every TV but accompanied by the propaganda that his mutation is the result of having sex with aliens, this desperate, terrified man has nowhere to go but District 9. He logically assumes MNU won't look for him there, and also that since Prawn technology has begun mutating him, surely the Prawns will know how to restore him. Fortunately, there is a Prawn (known as "Christoper") who can help him, the one whose shack full of contraband landed Wikus in this mess in the first place. Unfortunately, there's always a "but"...

This is a serious film. It's dark, it's strong, it's visceral, and when it's gory, it's gory. It's also one of the best films I've seen of any genre, and left me happy for hours, high on that glee that comes from being exposed to excellence. For starters, the story never stops making sense. When Wikus and Christopher hatch and execute a plan to raid MNU headquarters for a key piece of technology, it makes sense, because although like most field agents Wikus spends most of his time at a desk doing paperwork, field agents in his kind of field should all be trained how to raid a building - and on a much smaller scale, we see him do it twenty minutes earlier while serving eviction notices. In other words, his slow transformation into a Prawn isn't accompanied by a sudden, out of character transformation into a badass. He's a beauraucrat, sure, but Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell do away with the caricature of the beaureaucrat-as-idiot, instead portraying the paradox of the "other side" of being a special agent. A lot of reviews for District 9 describe Wikus as becoming sympathetic to the Prawn's plight due to his transformation; I can't say I saw that at all. Over the sixty-odd hours of realtime the film chronicles, Wikus is a desperate, terrified man, and it is that desperation and terror that drive him. He doesn't develop a new concern for the Prawn's problems, he's understandably consumed with his own, and in his desperation is willing to screw the one Prawn who can help him in order to end his nightmare. Wikus is a blessed anomaly of an action movie protagonist. He's a happy and sensitive goofball with a shy smile, merry eyes, and a habit of making little arts-and-crafts presents for his wife who also oppresses, murders, and displaces refugees in a similarly guileless fashion, as it's just a job that keeps everything running smoothly - and anyways, they're not even human. Far from being a wallflower nerd, he's outgoing and incredibly confident, the pros and cons of which the story brings into play. He's a beaureaucrat, aware and fond of regulations, and as befits someone in his position he is intelligent and resourceful. However, he's not uncommonly intelligent, and as his father-in-law ominously foreshadows, "he's never been very strong" - and that's not a reference to how much Wikus can bench-press. Without giving too much away, let's just say he doesn't produce a sudden act of redeeming heroism in the final reel. Not an evil man, but driven by desperation and terror - and, in that final reel, guilt and pragmatism - he is neither hero nor anti-hero. He's a character instead of a caricature, and so his actions are worth exploring as hypothetical "what would I..." questions in ways that those of the Final Reel Hero aren't.

In interviews prior to District 9's release, director Neill Blomkamp - who grew up in post-apartheid Johannesburg, but moved to Vancouver in his late teens and has his first official IMDB credit for CG animation on Stargate: SG-1 - stated that he had no intention of making an apartheid film, that District 9 should not be read as such, and that the setting is simply where he grew up. As an artist, I can say that the single hardest thing for an artist to accomplish, the thing most of us strive for, is to lay down a specific intent for a project, make it, and then hear people indepentently identify your work as having that intent. Blomkamp succeeded in making the film he wanted to make - connecting District 9 to an apartheid allegory would require imagination well beyond my limits. Instead, the social subtexts present in the film are current and unpopular ones: the plight of unwanted refugees, abortion, the eating of people for their powers. There's a running subplot in District 9 wherein a Nigerian shaman and warlord are constantly after Prawns because they believe that if they eat certain body parts, they will gain the ability to use Prawn technology. I don't know how serious a problem this is in Nigeria in particular, but it is a long-standing real-life issue in many African countries, and one that's not a popular concern for Western activists because since shamanism - i.e. cultural religion - comes into play, there's this warped idea that it would be culturally insensitive to rally against the practice (or racist to even suggest that shamanism is still practiced, period). The National Post's Vanessa Farquarhson demonstrated this in her review of the film, writing how this seemed "offensive" in a film about "respecting different species, cultures, and ethnicities." Unfortunately, in the same day's Post, the back page of the A section was almost entirely devoted to an article about how albinos in Tanzania are being abducted, dismembered, and murdered because many Tanzanians believe that eating albino parts will grant them special powers. Also, I really didn't read District 9 as having much to do with tolerance. It's a great story with many facets and subtexts, but it's not about racism or insensitivity. While racism and the existence of refugees are usually connected, they're still two very different problems, and if it's necessary to view District 9 through the lens of social commentary, the plight of (unwanted) refugees would be its primary message. But at its core, it's just a fantastic, sufficiently deep, gripping story about a desperate man on the run who's willing to do a lot in order to get his life back.

It also provides some great fictional food for thought. What were the Prawns doing so far from home in the first place (Christopher infers it takes at least a year of realtime to travel between Earth and his planet)? You don't go on sightseeing trips with hundreds of thousands of your countrymen and a huge weapons arsenal. Why are Christopher and one friend the only Prawns who seem to know how to repair their technology and fly their vessels? Is the rest of the flight/command crew dead? Did the other Prawns kill them, and is that why Christopher and his friend have kept their rebuilding of the command module from the rest of their people? And then there are the questions of the end of the film regarding what promises Christopher will keep, and what he'll do next. Because what's said and shown in the film is logical and satisfying, these questions are interesting daydreams to bandy about over a slice of pie rather than frustrating gaps in the story.

Of course, fantastic production, etcetera, etcetera. It looks great, and it's fantastic to see a new director with a background and formal training in CG animation know the limits of that medium. Produced and funded by Peter Jackson - thank you very much, sir - , District 9 is perhaps the smallest, cheapest film visually supported by the fine men and women of WETA Workshops who, though having an excellent CG department, are best-known for their models, miniatures, matte paintings, weapons, armor, and other "tangible" special effects. These disciplines combined produced things like the only alien I've seen that looked so terrified and dismayed, I actually felt its terror and dismay - that made aliens characters instead of aliens. On less than a third of the minimum budget projected for the Halo film Universal understandably denied a director with no proven return on that kind of investment, District 9 is one of the most visually satisfying, realistically engaging sci-fi flicks I know of. I mentioned early on that it has its fair share of gore - but this is an instance in which the term "its fair share" is truly applicable. There's nothing over-the-top or out of place, and it contains the only non-exploitative dismemberment I've ever seen on film. The decapitation and dismemberment of an important antagonist used as a regular, logical cause of death, filmed in the frame's background, and not for shock value? Neill Blomkamp, you amaze me.

Floating around the 'net is a short film Blomkamp made to show Universal what his Halo would look like. It's an impressive demonstration, and with District 9 garnering not only critical acclaim (nice, but not essential) but a strong box office (absolutely essential), I doubt I'm the only one who would be shocked if Halo is made with anyone else at the helm. And after seeing District 9, a film about aliens in Johannesburg that doesn't talk about apartheid and isn't over the top with the stuff it does talk about, I'd trust Blomkamp to make a Halo that wouldn't be stupid about the trilogy's religious zealot story. A mature filmmaker and proven artist making a movie of a great game that actually has a story to back it up?

BRING IT!

(And also go see District 9.)