Just as you've heard, Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" is something new, something possibly brilliant. For about 45 minutes. And then it reveals itself to be something like a lengthier retread of "28 Months Later" (has anyone seen that?), first utilizing a strong, chilling sci-fi concept to suck you in, then losing its character arcs somewhere along the line, and finally devolving into action that means absolutely nothing to people asking the bigger questions. Like me. I walked out of it more than a little exhausted. Probably because I saw the 10:55 showing, which included waiting in line for just under an hour beforehand, and literally 25 minutes of previews for every single zombie/vampire movie coming out until 2017. But also probably because for the last 45 minutes of the movie I found myself trying a little too hard to give a shit.
(Spoilers ahead.) I was a little frustrated with this movie mainly because it sets up this really interesting antihero, Wikus (Sharlto Copley), someone clearly very weak at his core, who has more than enough opportunities to shield that (a job with the government, a pretty wife whose father happens to his boss, a promotion from that same boss) but is suddenly thrown way out of his comfort zone into a situation almost impossible to solve peacefully. And on top of that, he's a complete asshole. The first 30 minutes or so of the movie consist of highly compelling documentary footage (strangely and sadly all but done away with in its second half), in which we see Wikus force aliens (known derogatorily as "prawns") out of their homes without a standard 24-hour eviction notice, insult their seemingly able intelligence to their faces, and literally stage the biggest abortion you've ever seen on screen. "Hear those pops? That's what's left of 'em burning up," he says to the camera. How can you NOT hate this guy? So I was waiting for him to get his comeuppance in some fashion, either grotesquely, or in a way that falls in line with the disorienting, mysterious, well-designed plot machinations of the film's first half. And for a while, the latter seems to be true, as disturbing scenes depicting Wikus' subjection to government experimentation makes "District 9" look something like a Nazi-themed remake of "Men In Black."
Soon enough, however, the movie becomes a quest for this asshole (who remains an asshole, or at least does nothing obvious to change that persona) to save his own ass, in ways that push past narrative plausibility and allow for a strange string of scenes that you've seen in many other movies but don't quite make sense for this particular character. For example, do we want to see him cry to his wife over the phone about wishing that things were different? How are we supposed to have sympathy for him after he tells an alien child that "we're not the fucking same"? By the time the movie kicked into "Iron Man"-esque action mode, with countless exploding bodies and reversals of fortune, I was a little confused. In not fully developing Wikus as a three-dimensional character, one with clear motives that we can understand and somewhat sympathize with despite his unshakable prejudices, director Blomkamp sacrifices what could have been a finale as chilling as his first act.
Which is not to say that "District 9" lacks qualities. In fact, this movie shows why spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie is unnecessary, given a lot of hard work. For a comparably small $30 million, Blomkamp, whose previous career was primarily as a special effects artist, creates a unique race of roach-like aliens with ambiguously sad faces that speak a crisp, eerily pleasant dialect of clicks and pops. Nothing in this movie is an eye- (or ear-) sore, even the hand-held camerawork, which fits with the documentary feel. An interesting aspect of the movie was the seeming lack of a language barrier between the human and alien species, which, if explored in a sequel, could lead to establishing some sort of new hybrid civilization. Though the last third of the movie doesn't really hint at progress in that regard.
Earlier this weekend I saw Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful new film, "Ponyo," which, as all his films do, reminded me just how important it is to find the human aspects of things we can't understand. More often than not, the things and people we define as "evil" are rooted in ignorance or misunderstanding. "District 9" very clearly sets up a situation that is chilling for its injustice, and gives us more than enough glimpses of global and psychological repercussions. Yet it loses itself in neglecting to bring its subversive protagonist down to earth.
