Wikus van de Merwe, the government bureaucrat played by Sharlto Copley in Neil Blomkamp’s sci-fi film District 9, would not be cast as anyone’s hero. With his floppy moustache and slouched shoulders, he represents the facile face of institutionalized racism — especially since his job is handing out eviction notices to millions of extraterrestrials living in slums outside Johannesburg after their mothership has stalled in the sky.
The aliens — referred to by humans (with veiled disgust) as “prawns” — are found to be malnourished and dying aboard their ship. The only bureaucratic solution seems to be a large tent city for the aliens that quickly turns into a slum. Crime escalates; other vices such as prostitution and arms dealing flourish. Then one alien is allowed to appear on a televised game show and successfully answers 10 questions for a grand prize…
No, that would be Slumdog Aliens. This is more A Prawn’s Life. We see how aliens live from day to day, and at first they’re not particularly likeable. Empathy levels are down to zero.
Wikus performs his eviction duties in front of a roving camera crew — à la Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project — with a queasy air of liberalism, assuring the camera that moving the aliens to containment camps hundreds of miles away is the best thing for all concerned.
His surface calm quickly evaporates as the aliens — nasty, churlish (well, wouldn’t you be, confined to a slum?) and communicating in a hostile series of clicks (obviously meant to resemble African dialects) — basically tell the bureaucrat to stick his eviction notices where the sun doesn’t shine.
They say the definition of a conservative is “a liberal who got mugged.” And that’s one of the chilling aspects of District 9: how quickly the fragile layer of civility in dealing with “the prawn problem” can crumble. Once Wikus gets taunted, slapped at and dissed by the squatter aliens, he loses his cool. Underneath all the liberal dogma, it seems, humans just want the aliens swept under the rug.
But in District 9, Wikus soon learns what it’s like to, in Harper Lee’s words, “step around inside someone else’s skin.”
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson helped Blomkamp, a young South African filmmaker, get District 9 made (he presumably hooked Blomkamp up with some first-rate makeup and CGI people; the aliens here are very convincing). In the process, Blomkamp turned his celebrated short film Alive in Joburg into a slick sci-fi flick that packs a moral punch with minimal Hollywood sentimentality. Sure, it references plenty of sci-fi films from the ‘80s — Cronenberg’s The Fly, Robocop, Aliens, plus TV shows like Alien Nation and the recent Transformers movies. But rarely have movie aliens seemed this sympathetic — or pathetic, especially as depicted scrounging through dumpsters for catfood cans (their personal catnip).
At first, the aliens seem truly alien — it’s no accident that the pseudo-documentary style dehumanizes the prawns in their slumdog setting; they’re made to seem hostile and distant. Almost like the thousands of faceless refugees in faceless makeshift camps we encounter so regularly on brief TV news clips. It’s the introduction of a much more articulate alien — registered by the humans as one “Christopher Johnson” — that tunes us into their world. Johnson and his plucky alien son are working on a secret project that will either mean mass destruction or salvation for their race.
People have asked me, “Hey, you hated Russell in Up, so how come you didn’t have a problem with that little alien kid in District 9? Isn’t he just as manipulative of audience emotions?” Sure he is. But arguably, you have to work harder to make aliens palatable to audiences than you do with little Wilderness Explorers.
And rarely have we had a lead character as morally dubious as Wikus. Copley — a non-actor friend of the director’s — carries the film with a compelling subplot that’s best left unrevealed. His smarmy pleasantries in the beginning seem unscripted; he’s as regular as any South African bloke who’s just trying to do his job, his platitudes about “helping” the prawns by moving them to camps don’t even seem condescending because he actually seems to believe his own bureaucratic B.S.
But darker forces are at work, of course. As with any sci-fi film involving aliens, E.T. technology becomes fodder for weapons research. Not only do big governments want a handle on the alien guns — which seem to emit devastating blast waves — but also low-rent crime warlords, who dominate the alien slums by doling out raw meat, prostitutes and cat food in exchange for the weapons (which are useless in human hands). The warlord angle recalls City of God, that sweeping epic of Brazil’s slums, but District 9 also brings to mind Slumdog Millionaire, though few would expect Blomkamp’s aliens to answer 10 questions correctly on a game show, and there sure as hell ain’t no dance routine to lighten things up at the end.
The problems with District 9 lie in the flimsiness of the plot, which involves recovering a key piece of alien technology from a lab and ensures that Wikus and Johnson will pair up in the ultimate alien buddy movie. This is perfect for moving an action story along, but it hardly addresses all the dark, underlying themes that Blomkamp raises in his opening scenes — which are as hard-hitting as a documentary, with the kind of edgy pseudo-realism that the recent lifeless remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still could have benefited from.
And will there be a sequel? As sure as you can say “District 10.”