In light of Hollywood's enduring fascination with space aliens it's a little surprising to realise that DISTRICT 9 is possibly the first mainstream movie to take the idea of technologically superior extra-terrestials attacking helpless earthlings and turn it on its head.
An enormous spaceship comes to a halt over the South African city of Johannesburg and just hangs there. When the military finally plucks up the courage to take a look on-board they discover hundreds of thousands of frightened malnourished aliens who willingly accept the offer of food and resettlement in a hurriedly built refugee camp just outside the city limits. Flash forward 20 years and the camp has become District 9, an overcrowded slum and the focal point for anger directed by the locals towards the "Prawns" (as the aliens are disparagingly called on account of their appearance). The government hires a shadowy Haliburton-esque private company called Multi-National United (MNU) to evict the aliens and relocate them to a new camp deep in the bush.
Shot in a documentary style and interspersed with tv news footage and comment from expert talking heads DISTRICT 9 chronicles the attempts of MNU, under the ineffectual leadership of field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) to enforce the eviction.
Wikus is a self-centred buffoon more concerned about looking good on camera than performing his job effectively but the series of increasingly horrific events which befall him as the story unfolds force us to radically re-assess our opinion of him.
While Wikus' transformation into a most unlikely hero is at the heart of DISTRICT 9 there's much more going on in this sci-fi docu-thriller than gunfights and state-sanctioned evil doings. Anyone old enough to remember the last 20 years of the apartheid system will recognise the analogy between the treatment of the Prawns and the minority white government's repression of the black majority. District 9 is nothing more than a sub-Soweto township and the Prawns are the new blacks, disenfranchised and exploited by everyone including the gangs of Nigerian thugs who live in their midst.
The message would seem to be that even the oppressed are not beyond oppressing others but DISTRICT 9 is not intended to preach or teach a history lesson. The parallels are there for anyone who cares to think about them but they don't detract from what is an exciting, fast-moving, bloody, violent and visceral piece of cinema. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp has created the grittiest piece of sci-fi cinema since John Carpenter's "The Thing" in 1982, and the fact that he succeeds without star-names, Will Smith-esque one-liners, or resorting to the destruction of New York, Washington DC or Los Angeles simply enhances his achievement.
No comments:
Post a Comment