The film takes place in an alternate present tense that has been indelibly shaped by the arrival 20 years earlier of a massive spaceship that descended from the sky and then stalled out just above Johannesburg, South Africa. In a dense opening montage of faux documentary footage, newscasts, and talking head interviews, Blokamp and coscreenwriter Terri Tatchell lay out the backstory of how the South African government waited three months for some sign of life inside the ship before eventually cutting into it and finding close to a million starving and confused six-foot alien workers. With nothing else to do with them, the government transferred the aliens (who are derisively referred to as “prawns” because they look like a gangly cross between a squid and a cockroach) to a settlement camp just outside the city called “District 9,” where they have resided--and multiplied--ever since (their ship, an impressive sight that becomes oddly mundane with familiarity as the film progresses, remains stranded in the sky).

When the story opens, there has been a wave of unrest in the camp--really a ramshackle, sun-scorched slum overrun with crime lords who exploit the prawns’ relatively meek nature and craving for cat food--which has caused the government to rethink its alien policy and move them further away from the human population to an even more remote tent camp called “District 10.” The government hires a massive private military contractor called Multinational United (MNU) to do the heavy lifting involved in relocating 1.8 million aliens. The man put in charge of the operation is one Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a well-meaning mustachioed dweeb whose wife (Vanessa Haywood) happens to be the daughter of MNU’s cutthroat CEO. Wikus is determined to prove that he is capable of the job, and the first 30 minutes of the film is presented documentary-style as he and an army of MNU soldiers-for-hire arrive in District 9 and begin rounding up the prawns for their relocation.

Things don’t exactly go according to plan, however, as Wikus is accidentally exposed to some secret alien matter, causing mutations that make his body suddenly very valuable to MNU, which has little compunction about cutting up aliens for military research and even less compunction about cutting up Wikus. The underlying goal is to make use of the prawns’ advanced weaponry, which is biologically engineered and can therefore only be used by someone with alien DNA. Wikus, recognizing that he is about to become a lab experiment, escapes from MNU’s clutches and spends the rest of the film on the run from Koobus (David James), MNU’s fascistic military leader. He finds refuge with a prawn called Christopher Johnson, who is in the midst of trying to execute a long-staged plan to return to the mothership and get it working again. Thus, Wikus finds himself in a desperate and uneasy alliance with one of the aliens that just hours earlier he was in charge of subjugating and moving.

The metaphorical implications of District 9 are quite obvious, with the prawns standing in for any oppressed minority and their forced settlement camp representing the kinds of devalued space into which such minorities are forced (directly or indirectly) to live. It has a kind of Twilight Zone-ish allegorical neatness that gives underlying weight to the subsequent firefights and chase sequences that constitute the film’s furiously charged surface. Blokamp knows that metaphorical implications are all well and good, but they need to be woven into an emotional narrative that keeps us drawn in, which is where Sharlto Copley comes in. As Wikus, Copley (who is not a professional actor and had never starred in a film before) gives an amazingly naturalistic central performance, morphing from office lackey with something to prove to a ragged man of increasing desperation who ultimately finds an inner strength of which we would not have thought him capable in the film’s opening moments when he was cheerfully bumbling around while trying to attach a microphone to his sweater vest.

With its invigorating mixture of conventional filmmaking with the appearance of “found footage” from CCTV cameras and television interviews, District 9 is consistently inventive and thoughtful in spinning its outrageous sci-fi riff on recognizable power dynamics. It has a fierce intelligence and a willingness to challenge expectations, which was possible only because the film was made far from the prying eyes of the kinds of studio executives who are generally fearful of entrusting a major project to an unknown like Blokamp. In fact, that is exactly how the film came to be: producer Peter Jackson hand-picked Blokamp, then a high-end commercial director, to helm a mega-budget screen version of the hit video game Halo. However, the project eventually fell apart, partially because the studio was uneasy handing the reigns of such an expensive film to an unknown quantity. So, Jackson charged Blokamp with coming up with a new project, which he did by spinning a short film he had made about an alien ghetto into District 9, which is double satisfying in that we get an clever, exciting, and provocative feature debut and one less movie based on a video game.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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