As a feature film debut, District 9 is a towering achievement. It’s a thundering blitzkrieg of seat-rattling entertainment with a sociopolitical message; a cerebral sci-fi and apartheid allegory that is as heavily armed with provocative ideas as it is with armour-piercing, tank-splattering torpedoes. It’s a film that flips our expectations: a story in which Man’s inhumanity to our non-human visitors paints us as the bad guys, rather than the aliens. It’s a landmark work in photorealist CGI technology. If it’s not the most thrilling cinematic surprise of the year, I can’t imagine what will be.
Neill Blomkamp, its 29-year-old South African-born co-writer and director, has envisaged an all-too-familiar alternative reality. More than 20 years earlier, an alien mother ship came to rest, hovering silently and ominously over Johannesburg. Humans braced themselves for an attack but none came. Instead it became clear that the insectoid aliens were starving and weak, and the deaths of those creatures higher up the hierarchy meant that they presented little threat to mankind. What they did present was a giant headache for the South African Government: a humanitarian crisis, or the non-human equivalent. The government response was to create a temporary refugee camp on the outskirts of the city. But District 9, as it was known, rapidly became a hell on Earth.
Initially shot largely in brisk, handheld, documentary-style camerawork, the images of the camp evoke archive news footage from South African townships and the frantic urgency of military operations in Iraq. A scorched dust-bowl of a slum with no electricity, no water and no hope, District 9 has reduced the aliens to a subsistence spent scavenging like cockroaches. They are hated by their human neighbours, preyed upon by unscrupulous gangsters but prevented from leaving by a government intent on stealing their weapons technology.
As the film opens, public pressure mounts and a trigger-happy private security firm is enlisted to evict the aliens and move them on. Led by a hapless pencil-pushing bureaucrat, Wikus Van De Merwe (a terrific turn from the newcomer Sharlto Copley), the eviction mission intimidates, patronises and, where necessary, slaughters the “prawns” to encourage them to leave their homes. Wikus and his team clearly view the job as a kind of glorified pest control — there’s a chilling scene in which he mugs to the camera while performing an “alien abortion” — torching a hut that concealed a cache of incubating eggs. “It sounds like popcorn,” he chuckles.
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Initially, it’s a challenge for the viewer to muster much empathy for the scuttling aliens. Then Blomkamp shows us their eyes. In these anguished amber orbs we see more humanity than in all of Wikus’s mercenary muscle put together. We see a grieving friend, a worried father and a wise soul. The eyes belong to “Christopher Johnson”, an alien engineer who forms an uneasy alliance with Wikus after the agent is contaminated with alien biomatter.
As the pace picks up, the mockumentary format gives way to straight action cinema. It’s a shift in style that should unbalance the whole film. But remarkably it doesn’t. In fact, if anything it kicks the movie up a gear: an audience who started out as observers become participants, fully immersed in District 9’s thudding, pulsing, nerve-shredding scramble for survival.
15, 112 mins