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District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Starring Sharlto Copley. Rated R. Opens Friday at area theaters.

Somewhere near the middle of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, corporate bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) and his alien friend Christopher Johnson blast their way into the headquarters of an evil multinational corporation known as MNU in search of the only trace of fuel left on the planet that can get Johnson home. The pair turns wave after wave of MNU security goons to jelly using an assortment of alien weapons before locating the precious gas and making an explosive getaway with an army of MNU’s finest in land-and-air pursuit. District 9 isn’t a video game adaptation, but watching the movie I kept thinking that it might as well be.

District 9 is the first film by Niell Blomkamp. The director was originally hired by Lord of the Rings wizard Peter Jackson to helm the big-screen adaptation of Bungie Studio’s Halo, a mega-grossing X-Box title that seems ripe for summer blockbuster status. The financing for the production soon fell apart (something about investors balking at an inexperienced director and a $150 million-plus price tag), and Halo was history. Jackson still wanted to give Blomkamp his big break, however, and thought back to Alive in Joburg, Blomkamp’s short film that caught Jackson’s eye in the first place. Maybe they could expand that into a feature?

Inspired by the director’s time in post-Apartheid South Africa, Joburg is a clever take on the standard aliens-among-us story. In Blomkamp’s vision, the E.T.s are interstellar refugees stranded on Earth and forced by their terrestrial hosts to live separate from humans in ghetto-like conditions. (One of Joburg’s aliens even begs for electricity and running water.) The short used a hodgepodge of film styles, leaning most-heavily on pseudo-TV news footage and talking-head interview segments. District 9 repurposes all of these elements as a jumping off point, expanding and fleshing them out in the process.

The basic plot of District 9 goes something like this: 28 years ago, an alien ship arrived in Johannesburg only to sit motionless over the city for days. Mankind, seeking high-tech goodies, finally cuts its way into the saucer only to find about a million malnourished, diseased aliens. The creatures, degradingly called “prawns” because of their resemblance to walking shrimp, are relocated to a slum in the city (the titular District 9), where they spend their days aimlessly rooting through garbage and getting high on cat food. Meanwhile, MNU, the corporation hired to administer to the prawns, is secretly dissecting our alien visitors and attempting to figure out their advanced weaponry.

After 28 years of close-proximity living, the human residents of Johannesburg have had enough and MNU plans to move the entire prawn population to a new camp a few hundred kilometers outside the city. Wikus Van de Merwe, normally an MNU desk jockey, heads into District 9 with a camera crew in tow, going door-to-door in search of contraband. While poking around one shanty hut, Van de Merwe accidentally sprays himself in the face with some kind of alien goop. Within hours, the man responsible for administering the forced relocation of 1.5 million aliens is himself turning into a prawn.

There is a lot more to the plot, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself. In truth, the “story” of District 9 is the weakest element of the film. I walked out scratching my head over a number of plot points, including why the prawns were here in the first place and the origin of Van de Merwe’s disease. (Alien gasoline turns humans into prawns? Really?) And don’t get me started about the unsatisfying conclusion. That being said, to reject District 9 because of lapses of plot is to miss the bigger picture.

This Blomkamp chap is a hell of a visual stylist. District 9 reportedly cost $30 million to make, but you’d think the budget was three times that. The prawns are wonderfully expressive creatures, convincing enough to inspire real attachment in the audience, and the alien technology (including spaceships, robots, and guns that shoot energy waves and lightning bolts) is fully realized and visually impressive. It’s so well done that I’ll bet much of this stuff was created for Halo and repurposed here. I’m all for recycling.

So, yes, the eye-candy is impressive, but that’s not enough. Two other factors push District 9 into the “recommended” category: Sharlto Copley’s performance as Van de Merwe and the film’s undercurrent of social commentary, jumping off from Apartheid but also including man’s general inhumanity to man. I link these two, because so much of the film’s message is wrapped up in Van de Merwe’s transformation from human to prawn, and it’s tough to imagine the film succeeding with Copley.

In the end, District 9 is more of a collection of great ideas than a fully formed movie, but I was OK with that. Blomkamp has made an assured directorial debut that cries out for a better sequel. As I was exiting the theater, I found myself hoping the director was already behind the lens toiling on District 10. There’s a great movie to be made from this material. We’ll be waiting, Neill.

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