District 9 delivers actions, attempts social commentary

Twenty eight years ago a massive alien space craft (remember the mother ship from Independence Day?) appears over Johannesburg, South Africa. Instead of sending down a envoy or attacking, it merely hangs there, motionless in the sky several thousand meters up. After three months mankind eventually sends a recon team up to the ship. They discover that it is silent and inoperable and that the aliens aboard, who seem to have evolved from crustaceans, are extremely sick, malnourished and on the verge of death. They appear directionless, as if they are but the worker class and all their leaders are gone, presumably killed by some disease, the same disease that has left the remaining aliens in such a sickly state. The aliens, pejoratively called “Prawns” for their resemblance to the delicious crayfish, are ferried down to the Earth’s surface and detained in District 9, an area of Johannesburg that soon becomes their ghetto. D-9 quickly accrues all the vices of any slum, including drug trade, prostitution, illegal weapons dealing and every other black market activity you could imagine. Fast forward to the present day, where Multi-National United (MNU) is contracted to relocate the alien slum to a new camp hundreds of kilometers away from the city. Bumbling middle-level bureaucrat Wickus Van De Merwe is charged with heading the ambitious operation– his father-in-law/boss dismisses the charge of nepotism– and leads his team into D-9 to notify it’s residents of their impending eviction, backed by battle-hardened paramilitary soldiers MNU contracted as the muscles of the mass move. Bumbling Wickus, while searching for contraband in one alien’s shack, stumbles upon a canister of liquid that he accidentally exposes himself to, making him ill and taking the story from it’s expected path.

The beginning of the film is presented as a documentary. We see various employees of MNU as well as people on the street react to the alien’s arrival and to Wickus’ actions that by the end of the movie we learn lead to an unexpected upheaval in the status quo. Traditional Hollywood film techniques are employed, interspersed occasionally with the aforementioned documentary interviews and security footage.

This film is co-writer/director Neill Blomkamp’s first feature– he’s only done commercials and music videos before, and it shows. Though the film attempts to explore dramatic themes such as apartheid, prejudice, mob mentality and political economy, it meanders too much to give the viewer a good picture of how they relate to the action-driven plot. A more experienced director could have done a better job incorporating the serious social commentary into the sci-fi frame. But producer Peter Jackson owed Blomkamp for the aborted Halo movie they intended to make together, and since Blomkamp is from South Africa his perspective on racism helps articulate that theme. Had this film been made by a Hollywood director it would most assuredly have lost all social commentary in favor of an all-out shoot-em-up with space battles and one-liners. More context for the aliens would have been nice, but again I think Blomkamp could not have handled more than what he did without making the movie a labor to watch. As it is, it has plenty of action, spectacular effects (all the aliens are computer-generated), a vague-but-pointed social commentary and a guarantee of a sequel. In all, a good movie to end the summer smash season on.