DISTRICT 9 review: brains, brawn and prawns

The teaser trailer for District 9 is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. You know the one, where the totally weird and alien thing sits in an interview room, with its face blurred, and clicks and pops and grunts in response to some questions asked by off-screen humans. It hooked my attention and piqued my anticipation more than any other trailer I can remember, that cold, chilling image of an intelligence completely alien and unfathomable, and it put District 9 on the top of my very short ‘must-see’ list for 2009.

The movie itself fails to deliver on the chilling, intellectual premise hinted at in the trailer, but still manages to spin an interesting tale of its own. Rather than following through on the idea of a chilly first contact, the film discusses the long-term effects of an unsolicited, unexciting alien occupation. You see, the spaceship that showed up over Johannesburg in 1982 was actually broken, and all the people inside it were dying. Stumped for ideas, the South African government chucked the ETs into cordoned-off tent fields once they proved a nuisance to the local populace.

Enter Wikus van der Merwe, bureaucratic boffin in carge of relocating the rapidly-expanding alien populace from District 9 to a new, bigger field of tents well away from the city and the poor burdened locals. Wikus is the classic everyman — boring office job, stable relationship, and a bit rough around the edges — and we sympathise with him even as he lets racial prejudice dictate his discourse when dealing with the aliens. Things don’t go too well for Wikus on his trip into District 9, and he ends up contracting some silly movie disease that seems to be transforming him into one of the aliens, and the rest of the film concerns his attempts to cure himself and avoid the cold-minded government as it attempts to capture him for study.

District 9 adopts a faux-documentary style, in that a lot of scenes feel improvised and the camera bobs around like the shots weren’t meticulously planned, like a cameraman is desperately trying to cover these unpredictable scenes as they unfold. The style works well at first, helped enormously by the urbane setting and mundane characters, but about halfway through the style switches to a more standard, anonymous third-person action camera and this albeit subtle change of gears is a little bit disorienting. Nevertheless, the documentary style helps to drive home the plight of the protagonist as his friends and family turn against him, as well as represent the aliens as living, breathing, exisiting creatures.

There is an undercurrent of racism running through the movie, but because the prawns of District 9 are essentially soulless, aimless creatures, it’s hard to truly sympathise with them. Luckily the screenwriters include a couple of genuinely sentient alien characters, and they help galvanise the heart and soul of the film. What’s vital here is the uncompromising nature of Wikus’ character. Even though his friends and family have turned their backs on him, and even though he’s turning into one of the aliens, he never really embraces his fate or accepts the aliens as friends. The only thing possessing Wikus’ mind is the desire to be cured so that he can go back home to his wife — allying himself with the intelligent alien called Christopher and his little alien child are just a means to this end. Wikus never befriends or even respects the alien, he just works alongside him to achieve mutual goals. This is refreshing to see in a big Hollywood picture — contrast this with Avatar, in which Jake Sully slowly becomes one of the Na’vi, and seems to immediately fall in love with the aliens and their way of life. Wikus’ journey is much more realistic. Like it or not, xenophobia is a logical and once-useful faculty of our consciousness, and District 9 invites us to plumb our own minds and ask ourselves how we would behave in his situation, especially in the face of the Cronenberg-esque body horror Wikus undergoes.

Somehow, this otherwise intelligent picture devolves into mindless cliche and action for some parts of the third act. The minute the first person’s head exploded, I felt the IQ in the room drop several points, and the only thing pulling me through all the ridiculous action scenes was Wikus’ journey. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of biffo in a movie, but inserting giant mech battles and messy government building infiltrations into an otherwise cerebral and morally intriguing narrative smacks of wanting to have the cake and eat it too.

I wanted to like District 9 more than I actually did. The concept, story and characters are all great, but I feel the filmmakers could really have pushed it all a little bit further, a little deeper into that grey place between good and evil. The visual effects, production design and performances are all world-class, top-of-the-line, triple-A efforts, and the script has great potential, but loses itself somewhere along the way. Nevertheless District 9 is one hell of a ride, challenging your intellect, morals and eardrums in equal measure, and stands tall as one of the best films of 2009, and one of the best action flicks of the decade.

District 9 score

82/100