Director: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood
Tagline: "You are not welcome here."
Random Trivia: Shot for 30$ million dollars, it broke that in the first week. Neill Blomkamp's first movie. Peter Jackson gave him the cash to make whatever he wanted after the HALO movie failed to find a greenlight. The shanty town is real; the aliens, obviously, are not. Filmed on location in Johannesburg. Sharlto Copley, the star of the movie, has exactly one acting credit on the IMDB at the time I'm writing this. The movie? District 9.
I've got a ton of reviews on the go right now, but this one is the most pressing, for obvious reasons. Caught it the first weekend after fighting traffic with HalfBaked and it was well worth the wait!
You're going to hear a lot of talk about Neill Blomkamp being the breakout director of the year for 2009.
Believe it.
I wasn't entirely won over by his script - he wrote District 9 as well - but when his writing lets him down, his directorial effort catches the fumble, making District 9 one of the best movies of the summer, and along with Star Trek, one of the best Sci-Fi movies in the past few years.
And one of the few, lately, with a compelling storyline. And awesome weapons. Pay attention to that: AWESOME WEAPONS.
You probably know the background here already - Neill had somehow managed to be tapped for the HALO movie that didn't happen. Peter Jackson, he of the massive oodles of Hobbit cash, decided to say "Hey, Neill - here's 30$ million, do whatever floats your dingy."
District 9 is the result.
I don't want to oversimplify it, but it boils down to the apartheid, with Aliens instead of Africans. It's a look at how humanity treats humanity, how we treat the other, how we adapt to societies that are different. It's how we long ago ceased to be culturally relativistic (not that we ever really were) and instead react in fear and revulsion against anything different from ourselves.
In other words, humanity as a whole is a bunch of narrow-sighted pricks, and District 9 gives us a constant reminder of it. How? By using the most obviously simple setup ever (and oddly, one used rarely in the past, with a few exceptions, i.e. Alien Nation and V to certain extents): An alien ship is crippled and winds up on earth, for a change not over a major American metropolis, but instead hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. It's inhabitants are quickly labeled prawns, for obvious physical resemblance to the sea creatures. They're sick, and seem to be simple drones.
Yet society never asks the obvious, at least, not more than they're obligated to. No one really seems to care how or why they arrived, where they came from, what life for them was like, whether they are in fact drones in some sort of hive society. No one asks how an entire city's worth of alien beings wound up on an advanced ship yet seem to have the simplicity of 10 year old boys.
We heal them because we have to, but the government is merely interested in their technology, and in particular, their weapons. We do what we can to steal this, and stick them in a fucking camp. When that camp is overflowing, we force them to move.
There you have the concept at its core. Humanity would rather adopt a society's weapons than any of its key cultural components.
The power is flickering as I write this, and the monitor continually dims with each burst of thunder. Cool...
District 9 is not a pretty film. It's star is not marketable; in fact, Sharlto Copley has but one acting credit to date: this. That's a huge advantage in this case, as he pulls off a believable everyman in the near future forced to react to events around him.
Which is key: the background I just gave you is unveiled in the opening minutes of the film. The story we see - which I'm not going to spoil - is not the story of the Prawns, per se, or how they get to Earth. It's the story of Wikus Van De Merwe (Copley), an employee of the MNU, charged with controlling - and, currently, relocating - the alien population on Earth.
It's not a pretty story, but it's an entertaining one.
My baked mind noticed the following, and I could be mistaken on a few points, but some of the cool things here included:
- the fact that the humans can understand the Prawn language, and the Prawns have learned to understand English - but neither of them really speak it. Perhaps the languages are too difficult to actually replicate for either race? Or maybe they can just manage a little here and there.
- Prawns getting human names.
- The cat food addiction.
- the weapons. Fuck yeah, the weapons.
- Well placed CGI that doesn't take you out of the movie.
- No vapid, obviously in the movie as masturbation material token hot chick.
I'll forgive the fact that the script gets a little too preachy in the long run. That's perhaps its only downfall. This is a movie I'll definitely be watching again.
Overall rating: 3/4 Baked (4 out of 5)
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