District 9 (2009)

The South African director of District 9, Neill Blomkamp, was originally slated to direct a movie based on the popular video game Halo. Fortunately, the deal fell through, and audiences were spared having to endure another awful game-adapted movie like those schlockmeister Uwe Boll repeatedly churns out. Instead, producer Peter Jackson stepped in to fund this film, which is developed from a short film Blomkamp made in 2005. Unfortunately, despite the inclusion of this well-known producer and a top-notch special effects team from New Zealand, District 9 is a weakly scripted amalgam of elements lifted from other, better movies.

The film’s basic premise is blatantly ripped off from the 1988 film and Fox TV series Alien Nation. Both stories begin with the recent arrival on Earth of a giant spaceship containing a horde of humanoid aliens in bad physical condition, who then attempt to resettle on Earth and cohabitate with humans. Furthering the ripoff, both stories have the aliens craving a disgusting food source as a delicacy (in Alien Nation, the Tenctonese love sour milk; in District 9, the aliens love cat food), speaking in impenetrable languages, and being saddled with ridiculous names by Earth bureaucracy — Alien Nation gave its spotted-headed aliens punny names like Sam Francisco; here, the lead alien, a tall shrimp-like creature with a tentacle-laden mouth and large claws, is incongruously named Christopher Johnson. Most tellingly, both films depict racism in a sci-fi setting, and each are set in an area with a history of racial intolerance: Los Angeles in the former, Johannesburg in the latter.

The main difference between the two stories is that in Alien Nation, the interspecies integration has progressed, albeit with a few problems. In District 9, the integration has not gone well at all. The aliens, labeled “prawns” by many due to their vague resemblance to crustaceans, arrived in Johannesburg 20 years ago, their giant spaceship hovering dead in the air over the city ever since, much like another movie being ripped off here, Independence Day. (Where’s Jeff Goldblum with his alien-compatible interface when we need him?) The aliens, originally found “malnourished” on the ship, were transported to temporary shelters — tents and shacks, actually — in an area known as District 9. This temporary housing eventually became their permanent home, a sprawling ramshackle slum cordoned off from the rest of the city, as interspecies relations became too violent and aliens were banned from many places. Basically, it’s apartheid with aliens instead of black people; it is a bit refreshing to see a South African movie showing whites and blacks working together, even if their common goal is the segregation of another species.

The movie starts with MNU, a multinational company in charge of alien relations, deciding to ostensibly improve the living conditions of the prawns by evicting them from District 9 and relocating them to some supposedly better area. In a convenient setup for hinting at familial conflict that is never resolved, a nerdy bureaucrat named Wikus (Sharlto Copley) is selected by his father-in law, an MNU bigwig, to be the unlikely leader of an armed force into District 9 to carry out the evictions. This sets up some truly ridiculous moments as Wikus asks the few prawns who answer the doors of their shacks to “scrawl” their signature on his clipboard, and the fewer prawns who don’t respond with violence instead bitch in their slurping subtitled language about the legalities of 24 hours notice. Wikus pats himself on the back as he discovers the prawns’ hidden stashes of electronics and alien weaponry, which seem to operate only with alien DNA and cannot be fired by humans. Then he finds a makeshift lab and a mysterious silver cylinder, which sprays a black fluid on his face and arm. One can easily surmise what starts to happen next, as the movie evolves into yet another ripoff, of David Cronenberg’s The Fly; black ichor starts to drip from Wikus’s nose and mouth, he starts developing prawn-like physical characteristics, he pulls off his fingernails (just as Jeff Goldblum did), and he has a sudden craving for cat food.

But of course, his new hybrid DNA is exactly what MNU needs for their nefarious weapons research department (a ripoff of the Alien quadrilogy), and once Wikus’s new-found alien super strength kicks in and he escapes the lab, “the hunter becomes the hunted” (Minority Report and countless other movies) and he must team up with the aforementioned prawn “Christopher Johnson” (back to ripping off Alien Nation again) and Johnson’s precocious prawn son, who can fix technical equipment (I don’t even want to think where this cutesy-poo idea was ripped off from) to fight off the MNU forces and cannibalistic Nigerian gangsters — did I forget to mention the Nigerians? — on their trail, recover the cylinder of black fluid, and make Wikus fully human again. All with the help of an alien suit of armor straight out of the Iron Man ripoff pile.

Blomkamp and Jackson use a documentary style to add a heightened sense of realism to the proceedings, and though it seems promising in the beginning, it later appears to be an excuse to shoot virtually the entire movie with handheld cameras, even in scenes where the “documentary” cameras would not really be present. In turn, that means we usually see the CGI prawns and other visual effects in shaky and unfocused shots, so they may seem impressive at a glance but feel more like a budget-cheating technique. Jackson’s special effects teams, who all did amazing work on The Lord Of The Rings, certainly are the best inclusion to the production of District 9, and aficionados of their work will flock to see this. But the script is a hodgepodge of stolen junk cobbled together like one of those alien shacks in the district, weakly resolved without any substantial dramatic payoffs, and — heaven help us — has an ending that sets up a possible sequel. Unless you seek danger, just obey the signs, humans, and stay away from District 9!