Kelly Wand"District 9" review
August 23rd 2009 09:52
Shots like this put the 'art' back in 'Apartheid.'
I liked District 9 but didn’t love it, which seems to place me in an obviously insane minority of one. (Except for Armond White, whose vocabulary makes me feel quite the poltroon.)
29-year-old South African director Neill Blomkamp’s feature debut is intriguing, memorable, and wildly popular, the last bit surprising news considering its light action, absence of marquee actors, deliberately inconclusive third act, and originality. Based on Blomkamp’s 6-minute short film Alive in Joburg (basically just a trailer/demo-reel for this) and funded by New Zealander* patron saint Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Studios, D9 exists because the more expensive deal for a Halo movie thankfully fell through -- and we’re all better for it.
The film’s darkly comic tone is established early on in a series of naturalistic found-video “interviews” and “documentary footage” that swiftly, cryptically detail how a gi-normous alien mothership settled over the city of Johannesburg one crazy day twenty years ago. After human explorers somehow penetrated its hull and found most of its chitinous crew (all but one belonging to a worker-drone caste with inferiority issues) dead from an unexplained illness that apparently precipitated the ship’s emergency landing on (above, rather) Earth, the remaining survivors were somehow naturalized and took up gloomy segregated residence in the city’s squalid ghetto of gang-run junkyards (allegory alert!), where for two decades they have proceeded to trade their useless machinery and sweet but inoperable weaponry for raw meat and cat-food. See, we’re not so different after all.
While it seems initially far-fetched that humans would ever find even these aliens boring enough to leave mostly unmolested and subject to mundane trumped-up eviction paperwork, Blomkamp makes this cosmic disinterest comically convincing. The Prawns’ inherent passivity to a bunch of dumb apes like us is ostensibly the result of their worker-caste conditioning, although you’d still think that with an indestructible mothership big enough to flatten any city and vastly cooler hand-to-hand weapons, numbers or no numbers we’d be the ones in the ghetto and the Prawns would be the oppressors. The Prawns, after all, exhibit mostly human emotions and priorities, and throughout our own history superior tech has decided every conflict to date. Yet outside of 2001, no movie made so far has supplied an alien race that finds us too negligible even to conquer. And let’s face it, we’re embarrassingly backward. As a species, we can’t even get past tribal warfare, let alone figure out space travel, but somehow in our movies we’ve managed to beat masters of interstellar travel with water, crop-dusting planes, computer viruses, refrigeration, folk music, blind luck, and the common cold. If I were a real alien watching this dumb-ass propaganda, I’d be shaking my weird gray fist and invading our probe-able redneck asses yesterday. District 9’s aliens are idiots too: they take orders from douchebags like us and can’t even make their own cat-food.
There’s no disputing director Neill Blomkamp’s comic energy and timing, his willingness not to pander, and his smooth transitions between carefully hurky-jurky “archival footage” and hand-held sequences of conventional narrative. The problem with D9 isn’t that it’s boring.
But while ambiguity is endemic to the movie’s comic style, so much is left unanswered that I felt gypped. Conceptually I admire that the human characters find the alien Prawns so uninteresting that although we can communicate with them to the point of understanding their speech, we don’t care to learn anything of their origins or philosophy. The movie’s tone is just realistic enough to make me crave such details. Conceptually I admire an anti-finale that cuts the story off in mid-sentence and defiantly refuses to resolve a single story thread, but since there’s already talk of a District 10, the bittersweet final shots aren’t poetic and modernist but just a set-up for a franchise. I didn’t leave the theatre wanting more about these straightforward, slow-witted characters. Given the movie’s justified success, the inevitable sequel means a higher budget and, I suspect, more “action” along the lines of the well-produced but conventional stuff that saturates D9’s third act. Sigh.
Before this shark-jumping videogamey hijinx lowers the awe factor considerably, D9’s eerie introductory shots of a massive refinery-shaped alien mothership hovering silently over Johannesburg spliced with faux-doc footage of the Prawns adapting to wretched existence in their bleak shantytown are captivating. In fact, just the images of downtown Johannesburg are captivating. To underscore the idea of our treating this immense fixture as little more than a scenic nuisance, Blomkamp ingeniously gives us a clueless middle-management bureaucrat to protagonize with. Wikus van der Merwe (played with endearing cluelessness by Sharlto Copley) is the newly promoted flunky of a corporation called MNU (which stands for Multi-Mational United, although all the employees sound vaguely South African) and he’s happily married to the boss’ daughter, who’s attractive, conventional, and appears to really love him (her relationship with her asshole father, though arguably crucial to the plot, isn’t really gone into). The muckety-mucks at MNU are highly interested in Prawn armaments, but, a bit arbitrarily, said weapons only work when operated by Prawns and are thus considered useless. Widely considered by his colleagues to be an ineffectual laughingstock, Wikus is nevertheless assigned to head a task-force to evict the Prawn squatters from their slums and "encourage" them to take up their new dismal residences outside city limits where no one will have to look at them. (Why not just deport them back to their ship?)
Ingeniously on Blomkamp and Copley’s parts, Wikus isn’t set up as especially compassionate or exceptional: he orders a Prawn hovel torched with flamethtowers and remarks cheerily on the popcorn sounds that the dying alien infants within make as they burn alive (I was curious about the smell). Ancillary characters including his wife refer in interviews to Wikus with sadness and in the past tense, so we know an ill fate awaits him but not the details. So far, so good.
In the course of his door-to-door raids, Wikus meets an unusually intelligent Prawn named Christopher, whom we can discern is intelligent because he’s wearing a red tunic like Enik on Land of the Lost, his shack is choc-a-bloc with computer parts and salvaged bits of technology, and he challenges the legality of MNU’s purge.
Despite being more physically imposing, understandably irritable, and capable of wielding their superior weapons, few of the Prawns give Wikus and his escorts much resistance. From what we’re shown, Prawns are easily manipulated and direly eager to trade anything they own for cat-food or raw meat, thereby begging the question: if they’re so pliable, why doesn’t MNU simply bribe them to use their weapons on nefarious human behalf in exchange for cat-food?
While bumbling around in Christopher’s shack, Wikus effortlessly locates a cryptic silver canister. This unprepossessing cylinder, we eventually learn, contains rare “fluid” which has taken the Prawns 20 years to obtain and is the key to repowering their ship and returning to their homeworld, so you’d expect it to be carefully stashed away and vigilantly guarded by their smartest member. But okay. While inanely fiddling with the canister, Wikus promptly gets blasted with a jet of toxic black spores and belatedly decides to put it carefully in a baggie for future investigation.
There are some amusingly grisly scenes of Wikus freaking out at work and a surprise party as he gloomily realizes that he’s somehow infected, that his hand has become a Prawn-claw, and that his corporate bosses, including his own heartless father-in-law, are more interested in harvesting his remains than curing him.
At this point, however, right around the scene when a cadre of MNU “physicians” remove a bloody gauze-bandage from Wikus’ arm to reveal some ghastly extraterrestrial metamorphosis in progress and we the audience are eagerly awaiting what will be Blomkamp’s next totally insane, unpredictable fastball…D9 makes the tragic mistake of remembering it’s a summer blockbuster and downshifts into a routine sci-fi action piece about stuff blowing up other stuff**.
*Mega-spoilerama-icles ensue!!!!!* It seems that the canister’s “fluid”, the Prawn rocket-fuel, turns humans into Prawns, which is pretty half-baked if you think about it. This is basically like a shrimp turning into a man by being doused with gasoline. Although this bizarre, unprecedented process is somehow known to be supposedly “accelerating”, the transformation pretty much restricts itself to one of Wikus’ hands and later an eye. Which lets him fire the alien weaponry (unwillingly). So MNU tries to cut his arm off, even though his transformation is far from complete and the severed lifeless limb would be militarily useless. Then a sedated, nauseated, unarmed, non-military-trained Wikus breaks out of the heavily patrolled high-security facility single-handedly. And wanders the streets of Johannesburg with impunity, despite there being a global manhunt for a freaked-out guy with a prawn-claw in full effect. And the news media reports MNU’s trumped-up charge of his having had sex with aliens, which in this mythos is a monstrous crime akin to necrophilia even though eating them is an accepted if superstitious practice and inter-species prostitution has already been casually alluded to. And we meet Christopher’s alien kid, the only kid in the whole shantytown, who’s cute and acts just like a human kid. And different gangster-guys want to cut off Wikus’ arm so they can eat it and “gain his power,” even though this process has never once worked before. And Wikus and Christopher break into the MNU facility to steal back the precious canister, which the humans just leave lying around like Christopher did. And apparently there’s still enough of this precious goo left in it even after Wikus inhaled a sufficient amount to get infected to still power up the mothership instantly and fly it to another star system (or galaxy). And during the break-in, Christopher learns that the humans have been performing medical experiments on his fellow Prawns, which surprises him, even though similar or worse abuses against his people have been going on publicly every day for 20 years. And Wikus gets into a combat-mech-suit and rides it around to kill off some stereotypically dickish mercenaries who were dicks to him earlier, and the mech-suit responds instantly to his three other still-human limbs and fits his smaller human frame well enough to operate. And Christopher never shoots anybody himself even when his kid’s life is endangered, even though we know they’re not exactly a pacifist race because they make such great weapons. And Christopher tells Wikus that he can “fix” him but that it’ll take exactly three Earth years, although he also says it’ll take him three years to fly back to his planet and come back with reinforcements to save his people (assuming any are still alive on Earth by then), which would make it more like six years. And eventually Wikus’ transformation becomes complete, but he still sends his wife small metal origami flowers, even though now he’s this totally different unique organism with decapod DNA who should have eyes only for female Prawns, along with a totally different worldview, metabolism, esthetics, and only one decent claw to make the petals with (he mutilates his other claw with an axe).
And that’s basically it. The fate of Wikus, the Prawns, Christopher, the evil father-in-law, and MNU are all left hanging like giant question-mark-shaped motherships at the end. Without the ship still around to spook humans, wouldn’t the remaining Prawns be instantly rounded up and used for more experiments? How does Wikus feel about being a Prawn? Does he live with other Prawns? Does he fight on their side now against MNU? How many other still-working mech-suits are there?
Except for Up, District 9’s still the best thing to happen over an anemic summer filled even more than usual with giant stupid robots, but no truly great movie requires a sequel to tell its original story. Those that do should at least let you re-use your ticket stub.
* The Puerto Rico of South Africa
**The inverse of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which starts out as an awesome science-fiction adventure movie and eventually degrades into a retarded horror movie.
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