I know I’m preaching to the choir when I point out that every week’s major release is either a remake, a sequel or an adaptation. So, you can well imagine the unbridled glee my tiny redheaded heart experienced when I heard that there was an original sci-fi movie taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, of all places, and shot like a documentary. Cloverfield 2: Babies in the ‘Burg, here I come!
Annoyingly, they give up on their mockumentary idea a few minutes in, but hey, District 9’s apparently got fresh, piping hot carnage to serve up to my American, gun-loving, Jack Bauer-worshipping sensibilities. “Artistic cinema” is for sissies, democrats and British people anyway. But just as the film’s starting to settle into political thriller, with maybe a sprinkling of social commentary, it goes Attention Deficit Disorder again and clutches into full horror throttle before it finally takes a pee break in Actiony Murdersville County and locks its keys in the car.
This being director Neill Blomkamp’s first…well, anything, I can understand why he might feel as if he has a big, Producer Peter Jackson chip on his shoulder. It shows a complete lack of faith in his material and his own abilities when he can’t stay on his Focalin long enough to pick which genre he likes best. And when your material is giant insect squid bears, you really don’t need a genre or a story, you just need to give them a SPACE GUN of some kind, point them towards a major metropolitan area and say “Humans over there: kill they ass.”
Actually, the much-touted action scenes are one of the movie’s biggest turn-offs. Now, it should be noted that I am an extreme proponent of violence. Bullet-riddled corpses, cities leveled in flame, surface-to-air nuclear phallic symbols rushing to penetrate an enemy base. I have a disease, and Hollywood has the cure: More, More, More. But even District 9 pushes the boundaries of Jason Statham-esque psycho-killer-romper-stomper and moves into the uncomfortable world of films like Hostel and Saw, where every kill has to be an in your face goregasm of bloodsplattery and maiming. Violence is all puppy dogs and sunshine until it goes from serving the story and devolves into killing for killing’s sake. The last hour of the movie is nothing but a disconnected series of grisly shootouts punctuated by the occasional explosion of grenades or firing of the alien’s electric tornado sound cannons, which look cool, and are. But once you’ve seen one alien electric tornado sound cannon, you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all.
Causing my violence stiffy to go limp isn’t among this film’s worst sins, however. District 9’s extremely graphic content is basically used as a crutch for even the most basic of character development. Wikas, District 9's leading biped, is forced to go through 30 minutes of Blomkamp’s most Hellish torture porn fantasies in a cheap attempt to evoke sympathy for someone who’s basically a middle management, government schmuck with a wife and dreams of a polished, mahogany oak desk to fall asleep behind. Wikas is barely on-screen an entire How I Met Your Mother before he’s suffering horribly under the sharp scalpel of some arbitrarily evil corporation of some kind, which is as arbitrarily evil as every other corporation in every other movie ever made ever. The events themselves are tragic, but not because they’re happening to Wikas in particular. Watching anyone be horrendously mutilated while they’re forced to watch on and scream and cry and vomit and bleed would make any of us feel pity. This is taking shortcuts to developing characters by making the events as graphic and sad as possible, diluting the importance of Wikas when he can be substituted for any dumb yutz.
You’ll be looking for love in all the wrong places if you expect to feel empathy for our new alien bestest buds evar, the prawn. Only appearing chiefly in the film’s first and last 20 minutes, the prawn are even more difficult characters to relate with in that they have almost no spoken lines, no indication of culture or tradition, and are portrayed as, alternatively, mindless drones, gun runners, carrion eaters, alcoholics, and dangerous psychotics.
Much has been said, however, by the media about how the plight of the prawns so meaningfully echoes the oppression endured by the South African people during Apartheid in the last century.
No.
Those who suffered at the hands of the National Party government lived in squalor at the point of a gun and the pen of a bureaucrat, but they made a life for themselves, they maintained a culture. They were heroes of the indomitable human spirit to just frickin’ live.
The prawn are mindless savages that eat catfood and sell giant fighting robots to voodoo-worshipping terrorists. And when we finally see these “poor, oppressed souls” magically reappear at the end of the movie, they tear a human being limb from limb, gobble him up and then go about their business. This is classic King Kong Syndrome, where the audience is asked to sympathize with a creature that can only charitably be described as a sociopath. The film’s lead prawn, Christopher, is followed around by his four year old son throughout the movie to inspire compassion for a character who’s supposed to be the prawn equivalent of a nuclear physicist (but perplexingly speaks like a second grader in his own tongue). You’ll quickly realize that there are no other prawn children in the entire movie, and so instead of creating a parallel with the suffering endured by children in real-life South Africa, the son comes off as a cheap gimmick to force a connection between ourselves and patently uninteresting characters.
If there’s more to the prawns, it was Blomkamp’s responsibility to prove it. And he went out of his way to fail completely in this regard.
Worst of all, the material isn’t challenging. You see, I’m glad we can all agree that slavery, genetic experimentation and evil, global conglomerates are SO totally not cool, but District 9 is merely whoring out truly horrific aspects of human history to pull our heart strings taut and keep our interest.
There are nice things to say about the movie, like the acting, the visuals and the uniqueness of the concept. Yes, the performances are good, but so what? This isn’t a movie filled with Shakespearean or even Dan-Brownian-caliber dialogue, this is just people saying f*ck a lot and yelling at each other.
And yes this movie looks pretty, but when is that an accomplishment anymore? For a ten dollar ticket price and an eight-figure movie, I’d damn well better be regularly bathing in The Gorgeous.
And yes, it’s a neat idea for a sci-fi movie. Though, the only reason anyone ever liked sci-fi was because the absolute best, in every scene, spoke of a larger world out there. That there are things that not even Google Advanced Search can uncover. Yes, even if you turn off the adult content filter.
District 9 mentions a homeworld of some kind all of three times, because the audience couldn’t have guessed that they weren’t from Spokane, and then returns to submerging your corneas in rich pools of AB-Positive.
Covered in entrails and decrying its at best cursory relationship with modern genocide, all the while lugging the carcasses of ideas that never took off, I have to ask: Why is this movie so popular?
Morgan McCormick is the co-host of MovieChatter. Click here to listen to an even more detailed discussion of District 9.
