Movie Review: District 9
Jeff Simon - Buffalo News
Aug 19, 2009
A Cool Riff on Man as Monster
'District 9' will blow your mind," blares the cover of Entertainment Weekly, in full movie hype mode.
Really? Nah. My mind whatever's left of it remained resolutely unblown. I'd be willing to put my money on your cerebral composure, too, when you leave the theater and amble off into the parking lot.
Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi fantasy about humans and aliens IS a wild one, though, probably the wildest film of the movie summer. In the summer movie sweepstakes, I wouldn't want to put it up against Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" for cinematic power or Pete Docter and Bob Peterson's "Up" for sheer creativity and humanity, but it's probably the gutsiest fantasy of the summer. It actually wants to say something about how inhuman we humans can be and it finds a rather brilliant and altogether exciting way to say it.
Again, though, even there, I wouldn't even try to put it up against "28 Days Later," that harrowingly effective thriller about the worst of our species under duress by Danny Boyle, who would go on to win every Oscar in sight with "Slumdog Millionaire." "28 Days Later" stays with you -- years later. I don't think "District 9" will stay with you until Christmas.
But director Blomkamp (Canadian by way of South Africa) and his producer, the great Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings" etc.), have a smart, edgy idea here. To wit: that if an alien spaceship somehow decided to hover over Johannesburg (exemplary home of apartheid) for a couple of decades, we humans would eventually march right up to it, gain entrance and herd every foul-looking extraterrestrial inhabitant into a slum of their own to fester and starve and die and plot against their oppressors -- us.
And make no mistake. These guys are really ugly -- skinny, walking crustaceans with vile and slippery tentacles covering their mouths ("Pirates of the Caribbean" anyone?) Because of their resemblance to certain bottom-feeding decapods that we humans love to consume as food, people simply call the aliens "prawns."
Everything that always happens when human beings decide to oppress others happens. Interspecies prostitution develops (a decidedly unsavory thought the more you see these creatures.) And yes, ultimately, there's a major effort to relocate the "prawns" from District 9 to a "District 10" TBA. It seems that our human cousins have decided they want to use the land in District 9 for something else other than keeping such disease, filth and alien misery out of sight.
Two things to know about these aliens: Human beings can't operate their technology or extremely sophisticated weaponry. And they love cat food, cans and all. Lots of jokes are made about that -- and what gives every one of those jokes a truly ghastly edge is how common it is in the West for those who are starving to be reduced to buying cat food for sustenance. If you have ever stood in a supermarket line behind a family who seemed only one step up from homelessness and watched them buy 25 cans of cat food and four loaves of bread, every laugh at a cat food "joke" in "District 9" will catch in your throat.
That, I submit, is the admirable brilliance of the first half of "District 9's" first half.
It IS a comedy, in a way -- just as Hitchcock's "Psycho" was (and so Hitch always said). Its view of modern life is acutely satiric. But don't expect many laughs. They come out as something else altogether -- rueful awakenings to just what "humanity" really means.
All of that is especially acute in that pseudo-documentary first half, before the action and frenzy and "plot" take over. In that first half we see what is, hands down I think, the summer's most brilliant performance by Sharlto Copley, as the hopeful South African bureaucrat assigned by his bigwig father-in-law to move the entire alien population of District 9 to an even less savory District 10.
His military accomplices in the alien "evacuation" are perfectly willing to subscribe to the worst soldier's credo of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." He, on the other hand, wants to find a more reasonable path to others' humiliation and accelerating misery. He's a minor virtuoso in treating a despised minority as badly as possible -- short, that is, of slaughter and conflagration.
He is classic middle management in the atrocity business, and Copley's performance in that first half is amazing -- all slimy energy and vile inventiveness. Unusual as it is, mark that name -- Sharlto Copley. He's South African and if we're lucky, this amazing performance will open some very dramatic doors over here.
When the plot sets in, he is accidentally infected with some black alien fluid (as with a lot of things here, it's never explained just what it is) and, in the movie's second half, winds up slowly transformed into part alien. In other words, his newly formed "Prawn" arm can operate that brutal alien gunnery.
He is, then, the most hated and most wanted man in Johannesburg simultaneously. And just as Dustin Hoffman's pretending to be a woman made him a better man in "Tootsie," our boy here only encounters what it might mean to be a man when he is slowly on his way to becoming another species entirely.
It's a very clever sci-fi thriller then with a central performance that's truly unforgettable.
But in its second half, it's all a lot of slam-bang action of a decidedly watchable and exciting sort.
But not exactly, uhhhhh, mind-blowing, though, you know?
DISTRICT 9
Three stars (Out of four)
Rated: R
Sharlto Copley stars in Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi horror number about human monsters trying to eradicate extraterrestrial monsters from their festering slum in Johannesburg. Opening Friday in area theaters.
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