District 9

District 9 was possibly the greatest cinematic surprise of 2009. Out of nowhere has come one of the best films of the year, and it’s a science fiction film. I don’t expect the film to get much love from the awards shows, but District 9 is one of the best 2 or three films of the year. District 9 is an intense emotional film, about aliens. It is everything that Avatar should be but isn’t. The film is brutal and fast-paced and, despite its brutality, eventually hopeful.

District 9 tells a not so unbelievable story of what humans might do if aliens came to Earth. The aliens, here termed ‘prawn’, come to Earth nearly death with a disabled space ship and hover over Johannesburg South Africa. Beneficent beings that humans are, the aliens are rescued, fed, and locked into a ghetto called District 9. There the humans proceed to exploit them in every way possible buying and selling the aliens’ stuff and do ungodly tests on them while keeping them as downtrodden as possible. The humans would probably have eradicated them entirely but the prawns have fantastical weapons that do not work with the human physiognomy.

Weta did the effects and they did a phenomenal job integrating the aliens and their technology into the South African landscape. It is as bleak and fraught with danger as anything from Slumdog Millionaire. The flat dun colors highlight the squalor of District 9 and the gross, disconcerting, and obviously alien prawn scurry through the shantytown like cockroaches.
District 9 is not a film that is easy to watch. It doesn’t make the obvious choices and the aliens are as foreign looking and as likeable as the insects they resemble. They are not cute and accessible to the audience and most of them have little personality or differentiation. The people scurrying around the Johannesburg landscape are littler better though they think themselves the superior race. There is no nice guy to root for, merely a scrabble for survival that is heart-wrenching. It is a story about how beings can willfully misunderstand one another.

District 9 is also the story of Wilkus Van De Merwe a middle management bureaucrat of no particular talent or beauty. He is a thoughtful if somewhat ridiculous husband who married fairly well but doesn’t seem cutout for greatness. Sharlto Copley, heretofor unknown, plays him as an average sap barely able to grasp the events unfolding around him much less react sanely to them. Copley has never carried a major film before but here he does an incredible job as an ordinary joe who suddenly develops kinship with the aliens after he is exposed to a technology that slowly turns him into one of the prawns.

Blomkamp gives the film a strange feel by beginning the movie with a documentary feel then moving to a larger scope of an action film. Initially coworkers are interviewed about Van De Merwe’s strange behavior and disappearance. Then the film goes back in time to follow Van De Merwe during the serving of notice to the inhabitants of District 9 that they are being moved further from town into and even more cramped slum named District 10. Sequel anyone? The film could have become tedious if the documentary approach had continued through the film but as Wilkus starts to diverge from his standard life and turn into one of the prawns the film steps back from the documentary perspective.

District 9 is at times a satisfying action film, making far better use of the human in a robot suit than either Avatar of GI Joe, it is a nail biting war film, and a heartfelt drama. I admit that the film was so intense that I had to get up and leave the room for a few minutes near the end. District 9 definitely deserves to be considered among the five best films of the year.