The back story and plot of District 9 are actually rather basic. Three decades ago, an alien spacecraft entered our atmosphere and began hovering over Johannesburg. After months with no activity, the South Africans boarded the ship and found about a million aliens (whom they dubbed, rather derisively, ‘prawns’) alive but seemingly stranded. The aliens were moved to a makeshift camp outside Johannesburg, the titular district 9, where they’ve lived as outcasts and second class citizens for the past thirty years. As the film opens, district 9 is in such a state of lawlessness and disrepair that the government has decided to move the aliens into a newly constructed facility 200 miles away from any human population centers. The plot of the film concerns the difficulties encountered during this forced relocation.
That the film is set in a ghetto just outside the South African capital is a deliberate attempt to draw a parallel between the back story of this film and apartheid. And, indeed, the similarities between the treatment of the aliens at the hands of the humans and the treatment of the native African population by the ruling white Afrikaners during Apartheid is a rich one. It’s impossible to listen to the humans talking about the aliens as if they were unwelcome pests over images of the aliens’ terrible living conditions without drawing the shudder-inducing conclusion that we’ve done the same sort of thing to our fellow humans for almost all of our history. It’s a bold and thorny issue to raise in what’s basically just an action picture and is thus all the more effective because of it.
Wikus van der Merwe (a terrific Sharlto Copley, in his first film role) is the bureaucrat charged with relocating the aliens. And as he sets about evicting them from their pathetic hovels, District 9 can be hard to watch. Backed by a team of elite military troops who shoot to kill at the slightest provocation, Wikus forces the aliens to do whatever he wants with no explanation and complete disregard for the havoc he's introducing into their lives. In these sequences, the humans treat the aliens so inhumanely that the audience’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the rather grotesque looking ‘prawns.’ And as the film progresses and Wikus (rather predictably, I’m afraid) finds himself becoming more and more aligned with the aliens, the humans become the villains and the aliens the heroes.
This is a rather bold approach to what is essentially an alien invasion film. In the long history of such films (which dates back at least to the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956), you’d be hard pressed to find more than a few films (ones with any real budget anyway) that attempted to get their audience to root for the destruction of human life in order to preserve the lives of the aliens. That District 9 is able to so thoroughly accomplish this role reversal is a testament to how powerful the film can be.
Unfortunately, as solid as the film is thematically, its execution leaves something to be desired. The first ten or so minutes of District 9 sets the film up to be a sort of documentary from sometime in the future, after the events which are about to unfold have happened. The film begins with what appears to be outtakes from a cable news interview with Wikus as he prepares to begin the alien relocation program. This footage is intercut with other interviews of the various players in the coming drama talking about the events of the film as if they had already happened. In essence, these first minutes set the film up as a something of a video history of the fictional events we are about to see. Thus we get lots of shots of news camera footage, some video shot by surveillance cameras, footage Wikus’s team shot during the forced relocation and even what appears to be video taken by some random bystanders.
But then, out of absolutely nowhere, the style of the film suddenly changes. Director Neill Blomkamp (making his directorial debut) cuts away from all this ‘real’ footage to show a couple of the aliens talking to each other. The film continues in this way for a little while before switching back to the news, surveillance and other ‘found’ footage. But then, a few minutes later, Blomkamp cuts to back to the aliens. Then, a few scenes after that, we start to see Wikus outside of the footage shot by either a news crew or his team. We see him at home, at work, even in the bathroom.
It’s such a radical shift in point of view that it jars the viewer completely out of the movie. Why bother going through all the trouble of establishing the point of view of the film as that of a distant, removed bystander only to suddenly shift to the point of view of Wikus and his alien allies halfway through? Why set up the film to be a faux documentary only to break that format almost as soon as it’s been established? On top of that, the un-sourced footage is shot in the same handheld style as the sourced footage, which blurs the line between the points of view and makes it seem like Blomkamp was aware of what he was doing and trying to hide it so that the audience wouldn’t notice.
Eventually, as the film uses more and more narrative, un-sourced footage and less and less of the news and surveillance camera footage, the shift in point of view becomes slightly less jarring. But it’s always there, on the edges, nagging at you. And it left me wondering, more than once, why the audience was allowed to see what we were seeing. If the filmmakers weren’t going to follow the rules they themselves had established, why go to the trouble of establishing them in the first place?
If, however, you can get past the point of view problems in District 9, there are plenty of little grace notes in the film that play like a breath of fresh air in a genre that had lately become old and tired. Take, for instance, the fact that our human weapons can destroy the alien technology. So conditioned are we, from countless other alien invasion films like Independence Day or The Day the Earth Stood Still, to think that alien technology is impervious to our puny weaponry, that it comes as something of a shock when a human missile is able to severely cripple one of the alien spacecraft.
There’s also the matter of the human names that are given to the aliens. Though it goes largely uncommented upon by the characters in the film, the idea that we would force such mundane names upon these creatures calls to mind the way we forced slaves to adopt the surnames of their masters in the antebellum American south or the way the Australians forced the Aborigines to take on ‘normal’ English names in early twentieth century Australia.
Small moments like those add up to a rich, complex and detailed film that has an awful lot on its mind. That it manages to raise all those questions while also being a genuinely gripping action film is a testament to the filmmaking skill on display here. If they'd just dispensed with the distracting and convoluted faux documentary set up, District 9 might have been truly great without having to tack on the qualifying phrase ‘for an summer action film.’
