While sitting on a death panel and trying to decide whether to abort
your grandmother, I’ve been thinking a lot about lies and
misrepresentation.
So has Neill Blomkamp, writer/director of District 9. In
2005, he made a short film, Alive in Joburg, about space aliens
who come to Earth as refugees and are treated to South African
apartheid, complete with shanty towns and “no aliens allowed” signs. In
District 9, he’s expanded the tale, added a well-executed if
somewhat unnecessary action story, and, more importantly, done a nice
job of showing how a change in perspective can result in an
overwhelming wave of propaganda.
The film starts as a pseudo-documentary, with videotaped interviews
with government officials and academic experts who’ve been studying the
aliens since they arrived in 1990, 20 years earlier. The creatures,
called “prawns” by their open-minded human neighbors, are about to be
relocated away from the center of Johannesburg to a place where they’ll
no doubt be happier living in conditions that are somehow even more
primitive than the shacks and refuse piles where they’re currently
ghettoized.
The documentary shows the prawns tearing at raw flesh, digging in
piles of litter, fighting, scaring the populace and committing random
acts of destruction. They’re hideous, insect-like humanoids who speak
in clicks and growls, and seem utterly unsympathetic. But then the film
switches from documentary format to narrative, and, without
contradicting itself, suddenly makes the aliens sympathetic and the
humans grotesque and barbaric.
The documentary section, which continues intermittently throughout
the film, follows middle-manager Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) as
he’s appointed to move the creatures away from the humans who find them
unsightly and frightening. According to the bureaucrats and academic
experts interviewed in the documentary, the aliens are aimless,
shiftless worker-drones who lack the intelligence or ambition to do
anything with their lives. It’s a strangely familiar charge coming from
the South African government.
But Wikus is a particularly weak-willed individual himself. In fact,
it’s Wikus who only acts when ordered to do so: The stereotype of the
aliens really applies to him and the brutal mercenaries he works with.
The real leaders, behind the scenes, include Wikus’ father-in-law, an
executive with a company that is trying to make use of the alien-weapon
technology.
Unknowingly, Wikus becomes a pawn in this game when he’s infected
with alien biofuel and becomes the only human capable of firing the
super-powered space guns. From there, the film loses a little of its
political focus and becomes a chase-and-action movie as the company and
its soldiers first experiment on, and then attempt to recapture, the
slowly mutating Wikus.
The effects-laden shoot-’em-up is definitely well-rendered, and it
is one of the best action films of the last few years, though the movie
might have been better if Blomkamp had stuck with political parable. He
does so for the first 20 minutes of the film, but when the documentary
section breaks off, Blomkamp felt the need to fill some time with a
narrative. It’s a forgivable move, considering how tensely edited and
well-shot the action is.
But Blomkamp doesn’t just give up on his political allegory.
Instead, he expands it, taking in not only questions of apartheid, but
the manipulation of the media and the way we represent those we find
burdensome. The alienness of the aliens is unsurpassed, and it helps
explain the horrors that humanity is willing to inflict on those who
look and act like something you’d want to squash underfoot if it ever
skittered across your kitchen floor.
But when things shift to the prawns’ point of view, the nature of
the grotesque creatures, while remaining alien, is also humanized. One
of the prawns, given the human name Christopher Johnson, becomes the
point of identification, which is interesting, since no one plays or
voices the character. Instead, he’s a CGI construct whose vocalizations
are machine-generated clicks and growls that are translated in
subtitles. Yet he becomes the most, and perhaps the only, fully
sympathetic character in a movie full of flawed figures. It’s nice that
Blomkamp didn’t make his human protagonist a simple hero: Wikus is a
lying coward, and as you start to root for him, he still manages to
alienate the audience through his stupidity and selfishness. Even when
Blomkamp redeems Wikus, he never simplifies him.
The fact that Blomkamp pulled off a successful, effects-laden action
film for $30 million, or about 12 percent of what Harry Potter and
the Bloody Prince Albert cost, is praiseworthy. But that he
succeeds in simultaneously making a film that will stick with you for
longer than it takes to digest your grease-covered popcorn is far more
impressive.
He even avoids, until the final sequence, the use of mood-demanding
music, trusting the audience to make up their own minds about how to
feel about murder, torture and forced imprisonment. In his first
feature, cinematographer Trent Opaloch shows all the technical chops of
an accomplished Hollywood lensman, knowing both how to shoot a clear,
easy-to-follow fight scene, and where to place the camera in tight
quarters to produce tension while retaining information.
In some ways, District 9‘s success can be partially
attributed to the technological revolution in filmmaking that’s allowed
almost anyone to make an effects movie. However, that same
technological revolution has only given people the means to do
so; the skill, as evinced by any 40-hour jag watching YouTube fan
trailers, is still something that rarely shows up.
Blomkamp and Opaloch have it. Their no-name actors give disturbingly
natural performances, and the film deals intelligently with political
issues. In spite of all that, it’s gripping entertainment. I can’t wait
for them to ruin it all in a sequel.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2009.
