District 9
As I get older and busier with work and life activities, and have less time to go see movies, I often leave theaters thinking “well that was a waste of time, I could’ve just watched that at home.” We do make time to go to the theater once in a while, but only if there’s something that feels really one-of-a-kind.
Watching District 9 was the first time in a while that I was glad to have gone to the cinema, with a full opening-night crowd. It was exhilarating, shocking, dramatic, emotional, and packed in some hectic, satisfying action during the climax. The nature of the film’s marketing also meant that no one in the audience could’ve seen what was coming.
D9 is a tale of man’s “first contact” with aliens, but subverted in an interesting way. Rather than overtly hostile (Independence Day) or friendly (Close Encounters), these aliens are not interested in humans. They aren’t here intentionally, to destroy us or to form an interstellar alliance, they’re merely “shipwrecked” on a far-away planet. The UN cracks into the ship’s hull, and shockingly discovers that the aliens are stranded, starving and leaderless in their dead spacecraft. The surviving million or so creatures are brought down into a makeshift ghetto while the authorities go back and forth for decades deciding what to do with them.
I loved the film’s international flavor, a product of the international nature of its production. The South African filmmakers use cinema conventions in an original way, adding a freshness to what would typically be a generic “genre” film. Not much else to say other than I loved every minute of it. I was riveted by the docu-vérité style (always a sucker for that), stunned by the effects shots, and cringing during all of Wikus’s Metamorphosis-inspired body horror transformation.
Reading about others’ experiences after seeing it, I noticed a couple of gripes that bothered me:
- Some complained that there was a hole in the film’s logic regarding the prawns’ behavior, the “why didn’t they use those weapons against the humans?” argument.
- A number of places mentioned the apartheid references being “obvious” or “clunky,” or somehow alluded to them being innefective.
In response to the first, the film makes it known early on that the prawn’s have a hierarchical society, similar to insects, and shows that the remaining population is leaderless. After the ship appears over Johannesburg, we see archival footage of a small craft detaching and disappearing, the leaders bailing on their people; a commentary in-and-of-itself on the universal nature of leadership’s ineptitude and lack of respect for the people it’s charged with leading. The leaderless prawns, without the capacity to organize, are shortsighted and self-interested. They get immediate satisfaction from chasing their “addiction” to cat food, whereas extended struggle against their oppressors would require more than they’re capable of. I would also ask “why don’t real-world oppressed people just rise up against their oppressors?” The film calls the main alien character, “Christopher Johnson”, one of the “smart ones,” indicating that he comes from a rare rank that has greater capacity for reasoning.
And as for the second complaint, I say anything that gets a landmark historical event like Apartheid back into the public consciousness works for me. I’m sure there are countless thousands of people, especially younger ones, that know nothing of the racial tensions in South Africa. Apartheid is a huge part of that nation’s history. Any method of showing the world what it was like, even if it means using aliens as a substitute for their mistreated populous, is a worthwhile effort.
If we got a constant stream of Apartheid films, of course this one isn’t terribly subtle in its references. But because it tackles a largely unknown element of a nation’s history, any way you can tell it is valuable.
