Take a trip to District 9

District 9 is one of the year’s best movies and it achieves its rank by taking chances. Boldly sidestepping the standard nervous intensity of first contact, director Neill Blomkamp’s story takes place instead twenty years after a massive alien ship was seemingly marooned in the skies over Johannesburg. As the ship ominously and literally reminds the city’s humans of the immediate, uncertain presence of “the other,” its former inhabitants reside below in a heavily policed slum called District 9. There they have been stripped of dignity and fed to addictions.

The nontraditional alien threat is a cultural one – at least in the eyes of the average citizen – and the surface level commentary looks obviously towards apartheid (and less obviously to the internment camps of WWII). Against all odds, Blomkamp is able to convincingly create racial tension between two species of which one is purely fictional, and a nonspeaking computer graphic to boot.

At the same time, the story takes a cynical look at a Blackwater-esque corporation called MNU which is tasked by the government with controlling security in D9. It becomes quickly apparent that the while the racial tensions boil in the public square, the corporate machine is concerned only with military exploitation. The alien weapons are only controlled through DNA compliance, so MNU runs secret and brutal tests on alien subjects trying to find a way to wield the technology. The comparisons in this case warrant a slightly more nuanced reading, as the corporate aspect (certainly a nod to Paul Verhoeven’s dystopian sci-fi) seems to draw a link between the real world contractors who run outside of the law in the Middle East and the purely evil eugenics of the Third Reich.

But the largest invitation to thought concerns the film’s main character, Wikus Van De Merwe, a slightly bumbling though well-intentioned MNU employee tasked with leading a relocation effort from D9 to a new camp further away. Van De Merwe is a wonderfully sympathetic character whose loyalty to his employer (not coincidentally run by his father-in-law) is honestly juxtaposed against his compassion for life – human or otherwise. When he encounters a life-threatening substance while conducting an eviction, Van De Merwe is forced to transcend the conflicts of race relations to consider what it means to be human (or not). What unfolds is a brilliant adaptation of the famous philosophical argument about Theseus’ ship.

For all of his genre defying depth, however, Blomkamp still appreciates the value of action and spectacle. As such, he treats us to some fantastically violent, bloody action sequences, the longest of which sits firmly next to Black Hawk Down in style and intensity. He also relies heavily the hovering mothership not only as a symbol, but as a very real potential threat. If the aliens are able to return to their ship, what happens next?

Like the Matrix ten years ago, District 9 succeeds because the director doesn’t give the audience what it expects. In a market dominated by formulas and audience assumptions, that is a wonderful thing.

5/5