Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/14/09
The pilot episode of TV's
The X-Files began with a disclaimer: “The following story
is inspired by actual documented accounts”. Creator Chris Carter
would later acknowledge that no such accounts had existed, but that the
text was forced upon him by FOX executives riding high on the success of
shows like COPS and America's Most Wanted who couldn't imagine
why anyone would want to watch anything that wasn't “true”. Of course,
the salad days of COPS seem pretty tame compared to the Reality
TV/YouTube rabbit hole down which much of our society has fallen, and more
and more movies in the years since The Blair Witch Project have
felt the need to add a layer of “reality” to their narratives through the
use of fake real footage. District 9, the much-ballyhooed
directorial debut of South African Neil Blomkamp, tells an allegorical
tale of his country repeating the sins of apartheid when a race of aliens
arrives in a derelict starship over Johannesburg. All the pieces
of a great sci-fi flick are here, and the second half of the movie builds
up an impressive head of steam. But Blomkamp had previously made
a mockumentary short on the same subject, and errs in revisiting the format
at feature length. As a fake documentary, District 9 is underdeveloped,
maddeningly inconsistent and unmemorable. The good stuff (including
a sensational debut performance by Sharlto Copley) is very good indeed,
and I liked the movie on balance. But I'm left to ponder what might
have been if Blomkamp had trusted his story enough to just tell it and
leave the Ken Burns stuff to people talking about something that actually
happened.
Wilkus Van De Merwe (Sharlto
Copley) is a bureaucrat at Multi-National United (MNU), a private company
contracted by the South African government to deal with their alien problem.
20 years earlier, a spaceship appeared over Johannesburg and simply hovered
for months until soldiers busted in to find starving alien drones wandering
around. The government took these “prawns” in and located them in
a ghetto called District 9 while trying to figure out alien weapons that
only work when fired by the aliens themselves. But the aliens and
people don't mesh, and the human population wants them out. That's
where Wilkus comes in: he's been assigned to carry out a relocation
program moving the shack-bound aliens to a new community (District 10)
that's little more than a concentration camp far away from prying human
eyes. In the process of trying to get the creatures to “sign” sham
eviction notices, he comes into contact with a cannister containing a strange
black liquid. Some squirts into his face and he becomes ill.
Really, really ill. Projectile-vomiting, fingernail-losing, growing
an alien hand kind of ill. And as he slowly turns into a prawn himself,
he's nabbed by the very MNU goons with whom he worked who find that he
can fire those alien weapons. Inexplicably, they plan to kill and
dissect him, but he escapes and takes refuge in District 9 with an alien
called Christopher Johnson who, it turns out, had worked for 20 years to
gather the contents of the cannister, which would allow him to fire up
the mothership and escape. It would also allow him to cure Wilkus,
creating an unlikely alliance to storm MNU headquarters and get that creepy
black liquid back.
Here's the thing: for
all of District 9's lofty ambitions, when it's working it's as a
souped-up South African riff on Alien Nation. Wilkus and Christopher
make a winning pair, even when the later is a purely CGI creation whose
every utterance is subtitled. In his own creepy, goopy bug-alien
way, Christopher Johnson might be the most expressive CGI creation ever
to grace the screen. And Copley, who had literally never acted before,
makes a truly auspicious big screen debut as the odious bureaucrat who
discovers his humanity while losing it. The assault on MNU headquarters
and extensive action back at District 9 are exciting sequences that bring
the Wilkus and Christopher characters alive in ways that the movie's more
sedate stretches never could.
There are some really awesome
effects in play, with the prawns and that ship that looms over Johannesburg
looking impressively functional rather than designed to be cool.
The prawns' abundance of tentacles are manipulated in ways that make them
surprisingly expressive. The alien weapons are imaginatively destructive,
with the MPAA's caution about “Bloody violence” well-earned: their
victims have a way of exploding like blood-filled balloons.
The biggest problem with
District 9 is that it seems to take forever to find its' footing.
I understand that there's a multitude of websites delving into the movie's
backstory, but what we actually see onscreen is frightfully underdeveloped
for a documentary. We get a multitiude of talking heads blathering
on in sweeping terms that may do a good job of simulating a bad documentary,
but certainly don't illuminate the story or supply any depth to an allegory
that references apartheid a lot more than it comments on it.
How do the blacks who once lived under it feel about now turning on a different
group of outsiders? Are the horror stories we hear of aliens killing
humans true or MNU fear-mongering? Why, outside of just grafting
on the plot of Alien Nation, would an alien be called Christopher
Johnson? We never find out. Wilkus is a total piece of crap
until he becomes infected and then at least becomes an interesting piece
of crap before finding a certain level of depth thrust upon him.
We see aliens only from a distance for the longest time before finally
getting to know Christopher and his son.
Worst of all, the early part
of the movie doesn't even work as a fake documentary, because while Blomkamp
doesn't take advantage of the format to hit us with information we might
not otherwise learn, he also won't allow himself to be constrained by it
in any way. As such, District 9 just stops being a documentary
whenever it feels like it and goes places no camera crew could possibly
have gone and witnesses things no one but his characters could possibly
have seen. The talking heads pretty much disappear around the one
hour mark (not coincidentally, that's when the movie finally starts to
deliver the goods), and until the closing scenes we don't see anything
“docu” other than an occasional running count of hours since Wilkus' infection
or footage from a security camera.
In the end, it's those two
lead characters who carry the day. Copley does amazing things even
with reaction shots inside a metal suit, and his chemistry with a CGI character
is remarkable. Of course, Christopher Johnson even has significant
chemistry with his own CGI son, and the two share a truly heartbreaking
moment when the parent tries to sugarcoat the coming horrors of District
10 for a child who just wants to go home. And the action in which
they find themselves is inventive and bruising, although the movie ends
on far more of a “Wilkus Van De Merwe will return in District 10”
note than I'd have preferred.
When District 9 struggles,
it really struggles. The things (the South African setting, the documentary
format) that are supposed to make it special are largely busts, and they
devour screentime when we need to be bonding with the characters.
But when it's rolling, it's really rolling. If in fact we should
find ourselves in the cramped quarters of District 10 sometime in the future,
I suggest Blomkamp worry less about bringing his vision into our world
and more about transporting us into his. No matter what the format,
I'm pretty sure I know this story wasn't inspired by actual documented
accounts. |
