Film Review: District 9

District 9 probably worked really well as a short, but it didn't translate quite right to a feature. On paper, it’s a great concept. A giant spacecraft hovers over Johannesburg until the humans break in, only to discover and then rescue a shipload of malnourished, lobsterlike crustaceans. The aliens are then confined to a slum—District 9, duh—where they are segregated and discriminated against. This is all shot in a mockumentary style complete with interviews and faux-newsreels. The protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe, is eventually assigned a task of relocating the aliens to a different (worse) slum, and in the process, he gets squirted with an alien fluid that causes him to slowly turn into a crustacean himself. It's VERY much like The Fly. Though I prefer the process on Jeff Goldblum. With the government hunting him down for the military now that he can operate powerful alien weaponry, Wikus is then forced to hide out in District 9 where he befriends a crustacean scientist named Christopher Johnson and his (cute?) son CJ. Christopher and the kid are the only sympathetic characters in the film. They're intelligent, sweet, and they just want to go home. We can all get on board with that. And Wikus? We can't care too much less about the bumbly bureaucrat and his boring wife. It's all the same to me if he turns into dinner at Red Lobster.

Back to the aliens. Whether or not you like District 9 ultimately comes down to whether or not you think Christopher Johnson cancels out and creates sympathy for the rest of his scavenging, tentacled, alien race. While these characters are certainly a lovely display of CGI, they are simultaneously gooey and hard-shelled, and ultimately disgusting. And their violent, unruly behavior matches their appearance: They buy cat-food (to eat) on the black market, and it's also suggested that they buy human prostitutes (ugh). Of course, anyone forced to live in such desperate and horrible conditions could revert to these barbarous kinds of behaviors. I get that. But when we see people this way, it's heartbreaking because we know what people are normally like, and the potential they have. I feel more emotion when I see a suffering person than a suffering man-shrimp. So shoot me. What I needed from this movie was a few more sympathetic aliens. That, and the characters could have been toned down to be less grotesque. I know it's what's on the inside that counts; they don't need to be shiny. Simply ditching the mouth-tentacles would have made a dramatic difference in my emotional response to this film.

Finally, let's address the apartheid allegory and racial commentary. If the aliens are the black South Africans in this allegory, they shouldn't be so disgusting. Forget about my emotional response and my gag reflex. It's offensive to draw that parallel. We should also look at the actual black characters in the film: They all seem to be either gangsters or tribal witch-doctors who eat aliens in hopes of absorbing the necessary DNA to operate the advanced weapons. (I know the white characters are also bad people, but they're still not trying to eat Wikus.) Black people are trying to violently kill the white protagonist for the entire movie, and I'm not sure why the black characters in District 9 are presented with such regressive imagery. It's possible I'm not getting the irony, but maybe the allegory itself should be more subtle, the irony more blatant.

The idea for District 9 and the first 45 minutes are solid, but the handheld camera and general grotesquery of the third act gave me a headache. I was also disappointed in the absence of an intentional laugh-beat for the fact that the alien is named Christopher Johnson. I mean, come on. That's silly.