DISTRICT 9 (2009)

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a phenomenal effort, and not just because it was the South African director’s first feature film. Its success can also only partly be explained by the fact that a science fiction film featuring extensive VFX, which still holds up brilliantly 15 years after its release, was somehow made for just $30M. District 9 is certainly worthy of praise because of these aspects of its production, but there is so much more to love about it.

The VFX isn’t just impressive in this movie: it’s phenomenal. Set in Johannesburg, the film follows Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a bureaucrat for a weapons manufacturer who is tasked with relocating aliens that arrived on Earth over two decades ago. Even the alien spacecraft that hovers above the city of Johannesburg is a fascinating sight, but the real achievement here is how seamlessly these aliens (who are dismissively referred to as ‘Prawns’) look when they’re integrated into their environment. There are countless scenes involving humans conversing with or oppressing the Prawns, and there isn’t a single moment where it doesn’t feel like an authentic interaction is taking place. Every exchange of dialogue feels real, and better yet, urgent.

Speaking of being integrated into their environment, in this film’s universe the opposite is true for the Prawns. This extraterrestrial species did not inspire the starry-eyed wonder or abject terror that the concept of aliens and spaceships typically conjures up in people. Instead, they turned out to be merely animals, like any other, which humans quickly learned when they entered their spaceship and discovered the Prawns’ dire living conditions.

From then on, the Prawns have been living in a giant slum, cordoned off from the rest of society. It’s Wikus’ job to get them to each sign a document agreeing to be relocated, where it is impossible not to imagine that they will either be executed or experimented on. All of this information being thrown at the viewer from the outset might seem like it would either be incredibly rushed or bland and exposition-heavy, but one of District 9’s greatest strengths is how it cleverly uses interviews and news footage to help us understand the dire world it presents.

Conversations with experts and people who once knew Wikus fit perfectly into this story, with these inclusions expanding on the lore of District 9’s fictional universe. What is most interesting about this is how eerily reminiscent it is of the world we live in (but I will expand on its links to colonialism and South Africa’s history of racial division later). It is fascinating to see aliens being reimagined as creatures that can be easily exploited and shepherded from place to place, with humanity shaping up to be pretty awful in its hastily improvised role as these creatures’ stewards.

Wikus is, at first, an intensely unlikeable character, whose affable nature and eagerness to please belies a disgusting attitude towards the Prawns. He talks in a friendly tone and puts on a smile when dealing with them, unable to understand what it is they’re saying as he insists they sign the piece of paper in his hands. But beneath this is a level of contempt that would fire up any viewer’s moral outrage.

Set over just a few days, District 9 follows Wikus’ tough workload on his first day of this new task, as he tries to diffuse tensions between the trigger-happy soldiers and the disaffected and frustrated Prawns. Wikus’ inhumanity is at its most egregious when he dismissively refers to a young Prawn as a creature that should not exist, showing no emotion at the thought of the boy being gunned down when he reminds a soldier that it is no longer legal to kill child Prawns. These scenes are made even more intense and immersive by being filmed in a documentary format. In many sequences, one can easily imagine a fellow Multi-National United (MNU) worker holding a camera as he tracks Wikus’ conversations and movements.

It might not make much logical sense how this film flits from documentary footage to a standard narrative approach visually, with news and interview footage being interspersed throughout. But this story is so engaging that the effect of showing these different perspectives, against all odds, becomes a seamless experience. This approach is even more effective when it covers the second half of the film, with Wikus struggling to reconcile his new condition after he accidentally sprays himself with liquid from an unknown device by a Prawn, Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), whose home Wikus was raiding.

As he becomes infused with the DNA of the Prawns, causing him to develop a claw for a hand, Wikus is treated with the same abject cruelty that he and his colleagues exhibited towards these beings earlier in the film. While the first half of the film was a brilliant portrayal of the banality of evil, where Wikus is a loving husband and friendly co-worker with a terrifying capacity for evil, it’s the subsequent scenes in District 9 that are the most difficult to watch.

For as effectively harrowing as these moments are, they involve characters suddenly becoming far crueller than they initially appeared. Wikus’ father-in-law Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar) goes from being stern and hard-hearted to comically evil, experiencing no semblance of remorse about torturing his son-in-law to learn more about the Prawns and how they operate. Colonel Koobus Venter (David James), a soldier who behaved antagonistically towards Wikus at the start of the film, also relishes the thought of capturing and killing him once this protagonist escapes the facility where he was being experimented on.

While it’s effective in showing how apathy towards the Prawns is so pronounced that these people would happily turn on someone they once knew if they showed signs of turning into one of them, these two characters emerge suddenly as crudely drawn villains. Little insight is given about the pair, and then they suddenly become irredeemable. But this oversight can be easily forgiven for just how harrowing this movie is in capturing the awfulness of Wikus’ detention, where he is face to face with the brutality of his superiors and can no longer hide behind the defence that he was simply carrying out his job. He knew all along that what he was doing was reprehensible, as he later tells Christopher that the relocation effort for the Prawns would ship them towards a concentration camp.

Now that he is unable to ignore this state-sanctioned violence, Wikus ironically becomes more human as he starts to resemble the prawns. Despite how frustrating Wikus can be at times, the camaraderie between him and Christopher is gratifying to experience after so much inhumanity in this film. The action in the latter half of District 9 is also a blast to watch, with constant cuts between news reports with aerial footage of unfurling violence, and these characters struggling to complete their noble mission amidst various factions looking to exploit them. The film’s intense, action-packed scenes are expertly paced and incredibly immersive.

It’s worth mentioning that the urgency in these sequences couldn’t exist without such great actors at the helm. Copley is excellent at playing Wikus, where it’s easy to hate him one moment and pity him greatly the next. It’s an excellent performance even without knowing that this was his acting debut in a feature film. While the immersion of the Prawns in their environments couldn’t have been achieved without excellent VFX, the actors in this movie must also be commended for always making it feel as though they were interacting with real people when conversing with this extraterrestrial species. Cope is also excellent, not just for his motion capture portrayal of Christopher, the movie’s most likeable character, but also for his background voice work (such as playing the cameraman who films Wikus), and his role as Grey Bradnan, one of the interview subjects and main narrators in the film.

Sound is also a well-executed aspect of District 9, with the Prawns’ language never coming across as flimsy or hastily thrown together. Even though it is solely comprised of clicking noises, their intonation makes it come across as a varied language. Some of the music choices are brilliant, with Clinton Shorter’s soundtrack at its best when it conveys the emotional depths of its subject. Just like this film, Shorter’s score has notes of tragedy but never wallows in despair. While Wikus is an often frustrating protagonist, he has the capacity for good, with this movie providing the rare set of circumstances that could draw these positive qualities out of him. It is a damning indictment of humanity that someone as kindly towards humans as Wikus needed to have his entire life destroyed to exhibit that same level of compassion towards the Prawns, with the film never coming across as heavy-handed in its depiction of this idea.

There are some excellent parallels between humanity’s abuse of this alien species and South Africa’s history of apartheid, not least the disgust that humans feel towards the Prawns, and their desire to keep them segregated from the rest of society. Naturally, living on the bottom rung of the social ladder leads the Prawns towards crime and aimlessness, since they are offered no positive outlets or ways to contribute to the world around them.

It’s telling that the government’s smear campaign against Wikus once he escapes from their torture facility is that he became infused with the Prawns’ DNA after having sex with one of them, recalling anti-miscegenation views in colonised countries like South Africa. It’s not just that the idea of a human and one of the Prawns sleeping together is seen as innately disgusting, it is also treated as a threat to the fabric of society, where there is suddenly fear that both species have become inextricably linked.

Often, movies that attempt to portray bigotry through a made-up species or group will be criticised for shunning actual historical injustices in favour of fabricated ones. But such stories are necessary when there are people who need to see another iteration of society depicted to reflect cruelty in the real world back at them, which District 9 does brilliantly. It’s for this reason that its criticisms of humanity shouldn’t be tied down to one particular area, although they do mirror South Africa’s racial divide in many ways, including massive inequality and the development of slums, whose abject conditions result in increased criminality.

The film also taps into the rights of Indigenous peoples being taken away, with the Prawns being removed from their homes so they can be relocated to a different part of the country, a move they will be unable to comprehend. (This also has historical precedent in South Africa, with the country’s District Six region having been declared a ‘whites only’ area by the South African government in 1966, leading to roughly 60,000 people being forcibly relocated to new housing over 25 kilometres away.) Although this alien species has come upon Earth, it’s humans who act like invaders. In keeping with this idea, the Prawns have been given Christian names, like Christopher or his good friend Paul, similar to how African natives had their names changed by Western colonialists.

It would also appear that people of all races in South Africa are united against the prawns, finding unity now that they can focus their disdain on one underprivileged group. While this is an admirable point to raise, it is a very strange one given this film’s glaring oversight: its treatment of Nigerian immigrants. A cluster of crime-obsessed Nigerians have taken up residence in District 9, where they exploit the Prawns’ talents for crafting unique technology and weaponry by offering them meagre amounts of food. On its own, there’s nothing wrong with this idea, since it could be used to explore how these immigrants have also been pushed to the margins of society, before finding a comfortable place in Johannesburg’s system of bigotry by treating the prawns as if they are beneath them.

This chance to uncover even greater social insight is completely squandered by a deeply insulting depiction of these Nigerian immigrants, who are depicted as a group of irredeemable and inhuman criminals. There is one very goofy moment in District 9 where comical and animalistic sound effects play out over some of these immigrants munching on the severed limb of an alien. The SFX is indistinguishable from a pack of animals tearing into their prey, while the subtext is even more insulting, depicting these Nigerian characters as deranged and backwards people who think that gorging on dismembered Prawn limbs will give them the alien species’ powers.

As the film continues, their behaviour is continually reprehensible, where every action they make or statement they utter is poised to invite disdain from the viewer. Even the gleefully homicidal and sociopathic Koobus isn’t this animalistically evil, unlike in a scene late in the film where these Nigerian criminals appear like a pack of ravenous hyenas, gleefully grabbing at Wikus so that they can cut off his arm and devour it. It would be unfortunate for representation like this to exist in any movie, but it is astounding that it appears in a film designed to reflect the ugliness of bigotry at audiences.

Though District 9 was rightfully criticised in the media and from Nigeria’s government for this portrayal, Malawian actor Eugene Wanangwa Khumbanyiwa, who portrays the Nigerian gang leader Obesandjo in the film, advised against interpreting District 9 literally on this front: “It’s a story, you know. It’s not like Nigerians do eat aliens. Aliens don’t even exist in the first place.”

While technically true, this isn’t a very satisfactory explanation, since District 9 is trying to be more than a feel-good film or escapist work of science fiction. Its lofty aims are brilliantly used to parallel the treatment of the Prawns with racism and colonialism, so this insulting representation is made even more stupefying by the fact that the film can also be looked at as a criticism of how immigrant groups are unfairly stigmatised.

The Prawns have accepted their given names, which don’t fit with a culture or language they are accustomed to, and they even understand English. Yet, despite these attempts at integration, they are looked down upon by strangers and forced to live in isolated slums, then despised for not making more of themselves. They’re even seen as inferior, even though humans, unlike the Prawns, can’t comprehend what this other species is saying when they communicate. All attempts at assimilation are rejected, so the Prawns are set up to fail, and then criticised harshly for doing so. It’s easy to see the parallels here between how the Prawns are shunned and stigmatised, and the unfair treatment many immigrants experience. For as fascinating as these insights are, especially considering how well they are incorporated into a fast-paced, action-packed story, this major oversight on Blomkamp and co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell’s part sours some of its impact.

Despite this blind spot, District 9 effortlessly weaves social commentary into its action set pieces and sci-fi concepts. Its ending is pitch-perfect, cleverly leaving the door open for more without needing a conclusive ending. There’s enough hinted at or outright stated to recognise the hopeful and tragic elements of this story, which perfectly encapsulates the beauty and horror of humanity. By not shying away from brutality while still offering a faint note of hope, District 9’s ending is an ideal conclusion to an emotionally resonant and highly entertaining film.

SOUTH AFRICA • USA • NEW ZEALAND • CANADA | 2009 | 112 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • NYANJA • AFRIKAANS • ZULU • XHOSA • SOTHO

Cast & Crew

director: Neill Blomkamp.
writers: Neill Blomkamp & Teri Tatchell (based on the short film ‘Alive in Joburg’ by Neill Blomkamp).
starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, David James, Vanessa Haywood, Mandla Gaduka, Kenneth Nkosi, Eugene Khumbaniyawa, Louis Minaar & Willian Allen Young.