District 9 (2009) – AMK Hub on 26 Aug. This film is anything but ordinary. It’s a mix of numerous elements which fortunately turned out very well. There’re pointed notes on world history and affairs, and also on modern film-making techniques.
The story goes like this: aliens have (somehow) landed on earth and taken refuge in Johannesburg. They don’t get welcomed when friction between aliens and humans results in violence. Actions to move them further away from human populated areas into concentration camps begin, and a multinational company called the Multinational United (MNU) is called in to do the dirty job.
Thematically, the film offers material we’re already familiar with. We’ve had Schindler’s List. This time, it’s aliens who’re being forced to live in squalor and ghetto. We’ve had films where government-influenced media puts propagandistic spin on dangerous developments. It shows up here too. And the film uses a mockumentary approach with insertions of numerous snippets of handheld ‘amateur’ footage, government representatives, interviews with alien experts, relatives and colleagues of key characters and so on. And the alien ship has landed in South Africa, of all places – and the film even pokes fun at itself by having dialog lines asking why it didn’t land in Manhattan or New York, as one would have expected from typical Hollywood films (think The Day The Earth Stood Still LOL).
Unusually and very nicely too, there are no big name Hollywood stars to distract filmgoers. No Brad Pitt, no Tom Cruise, and hell no Keanu Reeves. The cast are all unknown to me, but native South African actor Sharlto Copley is the lead actor and he pulls an amazing performance as the film’s main protagonist: a MNU operative who’s placed in charge of the alien eviction operation.
Copley reminds me a lot of Steve Carell and shares more than a passing resemblance. In the film, he’s a fish out of the water and a bureaucrat who’s clearly more comfortable behind a desk. When he’s afflicted with the alien compound that slowly transforms him into an alien, he becomes the world’s most hunted and valuable business artifact: because the mutation now allows him to operate alien weaponary that has so far eluded human usage. Cornered, he turns to the one group that can help him: the very aliens he’d been evicting. Talk about painful irony.
I have to make a mention of the production values too. The CG work is superlative, and the film desaturates color hues. The action scenes when aliens and humans fight are kinetic and very violent, but fortunately easy to follow compared to the crazed monkey-camera operation in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The alien themselves will get mixed reactions: they look like a cross between crustaceans and grasshoppers that stand on two legs. While they work in the context of the story’s point of view and for me, there’re already comments elsewhere remarking that they don’t look all that alien.
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All that said, while there’s been a lot of praise for District 9 heaped already, from a casual glance, it also seems several film critics have either missed or perhaps were just ready to forgive the film’s large plot holes. I don’t think these story holes sunk the film, but they’re still significant enough to have left lingering doubts in my head as we left the theatre.
Like why are the aliens so fascinated with cat food. Or why / how was that fluid compound synthesized from. Or how is that exposure to the fluid compound transforms humans into aliens. Or why is it that the aliens didn’t simply just resist human efforts to put them in concentration camps, given their scarily futuristic weaponary and whatever they managed to squirrel away from confiscation.
I don’t think it’s necessary given the film’s running length to have got into long expositions to explain these story points, but that the film provides little or no insight into these points indicates either that they’ll be explained in the probable sequel, or that important lines were left on the cutting room floor.
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On the overall, still one of the best science-fiction / thriller films I’ve seen at the theatre this year. Definitely better than Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, and Transformers. It’s not perfect and let down by large story oversights, but somewhat makes up for it with great production values, emotional intensity, and a story that’s an allegory for some of humanity’s most significant events this century.
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