Tuesday, August 18, 2009
I love a good blow-stuff-up-with-a-message flick.
Produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 has all the bells and whistles of a late-summer, video-game-playing-crowd, crowd-pleaser: explosions, bloody gore, swearing, massively destructive alien weaponry, et cetera.
But, oh, yeah, it also has that “message.”
What saves District 9 from being just another cash-grabber movie and makes it surprisingly fresh is that at its core, it’s really less about aliens and more about apartheid.
The movie opens with a documentary-style catch-up of the 20 or so years leading up to the present. It swiftly and realistically introduces the audience to a harsh reality in which aliens have been living in a former refugee camp – now a militarized ghetto – on the edge of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Set and shot in director Neill Blomkamp’s native country, these plot points interestingly evoke not only South Africa’s history of racism, but the kind of human oppression that seems to repeat over and over again throughout the world.
Sharlto Copley adeptly carries the film in its only major role as Wikus van der Merwe, an annoyingly chipper paper-pusher hired by his father-in-law to oversee the forced relocation of the aliens by Multi-National United. MNU is the government contractor in charge of District 9 that also happens to be one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers.
Wikus leads a camera crew through the slum as he goes from shack to shack giving notice of the relocation while attempting – and largely failing – to ease tensions between military and “humanitarian” groups. It’s then that he stumbles upon and accidentally sprays himself with a mysterious alien substance.
Within 24 hours, Wikus’ DNA begins to transform, horrifyingly threatening to transform the loving husband and painfully self-conscious people-pleaser into one of the “prawns” he sees as lower life forms.
The plot twist that this DNA transformation makes Wikus incredibly valuable to MNU supplies the action of the film. His former employer, MNU seeks to harvest his body in its attempt to manipulate alien weaponry for human use.
After escaping the MNU lab, Wikus, now powerless and alone, is forced to hide in the last place he’d ever go before his transformation — District 9.
Wikus forms a tense alliance with an alien called Christopher Johnson, Jason Cope, and the two go against MNU. Suffice to say, a lot of stuff gets blown up. And Wikus, fast turning into an alien, wrestles with emotions that make him seem more likeably human than ever before.
District 9 has a rare, perfectly balanced combination between well-paced summer blockbuster action and cerebral, emotional testimony of what it means to be human. That combination is what makes it both really entertaining and well-thought-out enough to be really, really good.
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