D9 poster
District 9
starring Sharlto Copley directed by Neill Blomkamp film, 1 hour and 52 minutes, in 2009
(contains massive spoilers)
Summary
The movie starts with images depicting the arrival of the extraterrestrial alien’s huge mothership above the city of Johannesburg 20 years ago. The mothership did nothing just hovered there, so the government of South Africa sent a team to board the ship. They found aliens, about a million of them, malnourished and huddled together in this cavernous area of the ship. The aliens are bipeds and looks like a cross between an insect and crustaceans. Humans will referred to them in a derogatory manner as prawns because of their appearance.
So South Africa with help and pressure from governments around the world ferried them down to the city to be fed, and cared for. And MNU a muti-national task force, was created to handle alien registration and supervision.
Things did not turn out rosy for the aliens as their strange behavior, habits, and outward appearance did not endear them to the human population of the city of Johannesburg. So the solution was to place and limit all of them in a fenced-off area called District 9. Living conditions inside District 9 quickly became squalid, lawless, and controlled by Nigerian crime syndicate.
Distrust and disgust from the human population of the city lead to another relocation via forced eviction of the aliens into another compound, a tent city that will become District 10. The task to lead this relocation fell on Wicus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) a MNU bureaucrat who owes his position to his father-in-law who happens to head the organization.
Wicus was inept in leading and supervising the task force composed mostly of soldiers and the relocation became violent. Soldiers were shooting at unarmed aliens at the slightest provocation. The relocation was also accompanied by a film crew that followed Wicus at every house and the latter was relishing the attention he was getting and since he was basically a buffoon, he accidentally sprayed himself with some liquid from a canister he found in one of the alien’s shack.
The exposure would have serious consequence as his body started to mutate into the anatomy and DNA of the aliens themselves. It turns out that MNU is also a cover for alien weapons research and experimentation, and since the alien’s weaponry is DNA-based, they saw value in harvesting the DNA of the mutated Wicus. He would be able to escape and become a fugitive pursued by MNU and by the Nigerian crime syndicate who literally wants a piece of him for some voodoo ritualistic cannibalism. Wicus only wants to return to his wife whom he loves so much so that he will then be forced to form an unlikely alliance with the aliens he was forcibly evicting to find a solution to his mutating form. The alien named Christopher Johnson agreed to help him in return for his help in getting back the confiscated canister held at MNU. The canister contains fuel for a crashed component of the mothership that the the alien needs to power the mothership and go back home.
Review
District 9 is about discrimination and segregation. It is about apartheid. It showed us how it was so easy to hate the aliens since they look sinister and disgusting in their ways. How it was easy to treat them as herds of cattle fencing them and allowing them to be exploited by criminals because they acted like savages.
But District 9 is also a movie about a man’s love for his wife and the how experiencing oppression firsthand can lead one to sympathize with an alien’s resolve to free his people.
District 9 gave us the unlikely and tragic hero in the person of Wicus. The story revolved around Wicus and I liked how the director, Neill Blomkamp, presented it through the “eyes of the lens,” by seemingly piecing together the video footage from the film crew that followed Wicus during the forced eviction of District 9 residents, interviews of his colleagues and family, and the usual talking head experts giving their take on the aftermath of the eviction. Using a documentary-style approach, the director was able to involve the audience in Wicus’ transformation in terms of his appearance and his views and feelings towards the aliens.
We saw how his circumstances changed from being an ordinary guy who have been culturally conditioned to hate the aliens and tasked to make their forced eviction happen to someone who suddenly found himself the recipient of the same kind of cruelty inflicted on the aliens. We saw how his love for his wife and basic human decency made him finally sympathized with the aliens and help them escape. Also, showing Wicus love for his wife helped in humanizing a character that initially started as somewhat comical, pompous, and detestable. Acting was top-notch, there were no big-named celebrity and Wicus was played by a relative unknown, and yet he and the rest of the cast was able to carry the movie and engage the audience.
Other aspects of the movie also contributed into making its story and look believable. The CGI looks fantastic, the aliens look real and the special effects did not overwhelm what is essentially a character-driven movie. There were scenes that comes off as overly violent or nasty (you’ll know it when you see it), but necessary to depict Wicus mutation and the cruelty of the MNU soldiers and the Nigerian crime syndicate members.I also think it worked that there was a lot of levity in the movie. From the aliens loving cat food to the dialogue and the way Wicus comports himself in the beginning of the movie, it gave District 9 a relief from the serious theme and at times disturbing imagery.
I highly recommend District 9.