When a textbook on early 21st century film is finally written, District 9 will make an interesting footnote. It is a significant failure on two major levels (as a faux-documentary and as political commentary), but it is a strong indication of where we are headed as a cinema, combining various formats and ideas that have been gestating in movies for the last decade or so without ever cohering into the watershed film that it probably could have been. Indeed, if anything, it shows us just how far we have to go before that movie becomes a possibility.
Twenty years before the film’s story begins, an alien ship descended into the sky just above Johannesburg, South Africa, and just sort of stayed there. After a while, the government sent some people up into the ship and retrieve the literally hundreds of inhabitants (referred to as “prawns” throughout the film) and bring them down to Earth. Though the vessel remains floating in the sky, the aliens have been confined to a small patch of the city called District 9 and are effectively segregated from the rest of the population. Because the film needs to feign some sort of a social consciousness, this precipitates a good deal of tension between the local population and the aliens, which forces the removal of the aliens to an entirely different (but just as squalid and undesirable) location. The man put in charge of this extraction, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), organizes a routine sweep of District 9 with the backing of the military, but discovers that the alien population is quietly organizing itself for a grand maneuver, which may or may not be hostile.
If you live in a major city, you’ve probably found the advertising campaign for this film inescapable. Posters and billboards featuring the phrase ‘this area for humans only’ with an accompanying illustration of an alien figure crossed out in Ghostbusters fashion have been placed on almost every imaginable surface, including ones not typically reserved for ad space. In effect, they have created a sort of synthetic reality expressly to market this film, and it may be the smartest thing that the filmmakers thought to do. Because the modern film occupies so many levels of media space (is there a form of media that has not been used to promote a major release?), District 9 integrates many different media forms to reflect that. The events of the film unfold (although the experience really started months ago when those billboards started popping up everywhere) in documentary, in television news broadcast, in home video, and finally, in plain old movie. This is both the vision of the film (let’s face it: it’s only a matter of time before movies start to play out in all of these forms at once) and its downfall, because the reach of the film’s direction exceeds its grasp at nearly every turn. Rather than sticking with any one of these forms for any length, it simply pops in and out of them whenever it feels like it, utilizing each of them as a crutch whenever a scene is feeling too thin, or some important piece of exposition needs to be given. More than once, it’s hard to tell what you’re even supposed to be watching, and the whole thing feels like it would have been better suited for some purchased air time on CNN (and it’s not as if there’s no precedent for something like that).
But the director’s identity crisis is absolutely nothing compared to the screenwriter’s (although, in this case, they happen to be the same guy). Ever since our generation collectively decided that it really liked zombies about a decade ago, there has been an overarching obsession with making social points (or at least cribbing imagery from the Iraq war and 9/11) that has swept through nearly all of our nation’s well-loved monsters, from aliens (The War of the Worlds) to thrill killers (Hostel), and Blomkamp isn’t about to be left out. Here, he not only goes ahead and sets the film in South Africa, he advertises the film with imagery that directly recalls the Jim Crow laws, as well as numerous other modern examples of forced segregation. The point should be obvious: intolerance is bad. But by his choice of location (and casting the South African blacks and whites as oppressors of a new minority group), and his possibly unwitting evocation of numerous ongoing conflicts (Gaza in particular), it’s hard not to wonder what point he’s trying to make here, and whether or not it has any practical application in the real world. Or perhaps the better question is, when history has finally judged our place in it, would you rather be seen as the equal opportunity fascistic army, or the garbage-eating alien? The choice is up to you.
If nothing else, District 9 is the movie that we should have been expecting since The Blair Witch Project; one in which the media ancillary to the feature is as important as the feature itself. But by doing that, it has also demonstrated the limits of the feature itself, because eventually, it has to be a cohesive movie in and of itself. District 9 might be a disappointment as a movie, but only because it would have made a great series of commercials.
"District 9" opens August 14, 2009 and is rated R. Sci-Fi. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Written by Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell. Starring Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sharlto Copley, Sylvaine Strike, Vanessa Haywood, William Allen Young.
