From the outset I have to say this movie is engrossing and adrenaline inducing, which may have been heightened by the sugar rush of a hastily consumed can of Coke before the screening. That may have clouded my initial reaction to the film, which was “fooken awesem”. Yes, the South African accent, which grated initially, became such an integral part of it and started seeping into my brain, the same effect The Wire has on me, where I just feel like swearing all the time after an episode. With a day to reflect on the film I’m beginning to think it wasn’t quite as good as I originally thought. The problem with it is it not as smart as it wants to be, much like the lead character, Wikus van der Merwe. The film started out as short about aliens in the slums of Johannesburg, and like Wikus, was suddenly promoted to a position it possibly wasn’t ready for and, dare I say it, mutated along the way.
The idea of using space aliens as a metaphor for racism is not a new idea and has been done well in Alien Nation (1988) and John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984), amongst others. Of course, in those cases it is dealing with two different races – humans and extraterrestrial – rather than prejudice based on skin colour, nationality or culture. Naturally, setting this film in South Africa does drive the point home even harder, because not only was it shot in an abandoned Soweto slum, but the South African accent is immediately associated with white supremacist ideas as much as that of the American Deep South.
Most of the film as shot in a documentary style, with a lot of actual news footage used throughout the movie. We meet the protagonist Wikus as he is about to be promoted to overseeing the relocation of the aliens (or prawns as they are more commonly known) from District 9 to a new camp further away from the city. This is being done MNU (Multi-National United), a less than ethical corporation (aren’t they all?), who bring in mercenaries to ensure the enforced evictions are, well, enforced. However, the evictions don’t go well for Wikus and he becomes infected and is eventually forced to hide out with the aliens while being hunted down by MNU. Apart from the films mentioned earlier, I did find a lot of parallels with two other films, District 13 (the Luc Besson penned French action movie) and RoboCop, minus the satire. And the robot at the end of D9 had more than a passing resemblance to ED-209.
As I already said, the film moves along at a cracking pace that sucks you into the story’s world and doesn’t leave you time to really question some of the logical inconsistencies, a major one being: why hadn’t the Americans tried to take over the spaceship or anything to do with the aliens, when they interfere with everything else? There are many others, and it is easy to nit-pick but to be fair it is still a great sci-fi film, and certainly got me more excited than Avatar. Weta have done an amazing job creating the aliens and they are totally convincing to watch and I didn’t find myself being distracted by them being CGI.
Faults and the obvious message aside, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts (in contrast to many Hollywood movies of late, which are the opposite) and is a great piece of entertainment. It is actually nice not to have any Americans in there trying to save the day, or force a typical Hollywood ending. Just firmly suspend your disbelief and enjoy it for what it is.