It’s gritty, funny, has great special effects, and is conceptually a great idea. But District 9 might be the most unjustifiably praised movie of the summer. While it’s watchable, it is stylistically inconsistent and mishandles the allegorical concepts in a way that borders insensitivity. What’s more, when boiled down, the film avoids actually addressing most of the plot elements it introduces to tell a standard man-on-the-run storyline. District 9 opens with “archive” footage and a series of interviews explaining how the aliens came to Earth as refugees before transitioning into a documentary-style film following the process of evicting the “Prawns” for relocation to a new camp. Maybe it’s still a bit novel, but cinéma vérité techniques feel played out given the amount of horror and action movies that have used them in recent years (Quarantine, Cloverfield), but more so the amount of recent TV shows to do so (Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Reno 911! and Arrested Development to name a few). It’s not like these techniques can’t be used, but they have a tendency to feel like a cheap attempt to give a film “real world” substance and legitimacy. In District 9, they are used at random and to make up for the lack of actual story written in the dialog and character action. The interviews are inserted only to expatiate and when the storyline provides limitations for the documentary-style, it switches to an omniscient camera perspective. It’s just sloppy.
There’s also an absurdity to the circumstances of the film to begin with. The lead character, Sharlto Copley’s Wikus van der Merwe, is a likeable goofball despite being somewhat bigoted and dimwitted. He ends up on the run from his villainous father-in-law after he makes a bumbling error and starts to become an alien. It’s an almost farcical set-up, which might be fine if it wasn’t trying to be a realistic portrayal of what might happen if aliens did become stranded on Earth.
When Wikus encounters the “weapon” leading to his transformation, the plot seems to indicate the aliens might be readying for a revolt of some sort. But that’s not the case. The weapon isn’t even a weapon. It’s just a device used to start Wikus’s transformation and put him on the run. The main reason for the film’s story even happening is an unexplained side-effect of space ship fuel… Apparently.
The film also renders apartheid as nothing more than a policy forcing people to live in a slum. The most the film does to create atmosphere is explain that a corrupt sub-culture exists, but this really only serves to provide second tier villains in the form of Nigerian vice lords. (As explained by interview narration, of course.) Given how complicated the issues of apartheid were I can understand not wanting to do a mirror situation for every circumstance, but District 9 (the slum) isn’t much more than a gritty, atypical setting for Wikus’s drama to play out. And is that really acceptable when there is so much silliness and sloppiness in the rest of the film?
The “Prawns” have only two sympathetic members to their race. (Possibly three if you count a throw-away murder victim.) They’re characterized as a savage, under-class who are probably better off kept in District 9. The refugees “take orders well” because they are (allegedly) a lower cast within their own species. They are satisfied by cow heads and cat food. We know “Prawn” is a slur, but we never learn what the aliens actually call themselves. Everyone in District 9 is sub-human and more like prisoners than detainees. That’s not exactly how most people remember those who suffered under apartheid.
Making the Prawns an inherently ignorant, under-class allows the film to avoid addressing why they have not used their vastly superior weaponry to revolt or why they don’t organize to fix their ship and leave Earth when all they need is a coke can’s worth of fuel to do so. No, there is only one Prawn who is smart enough to do that. It’s a heavy-handed variation of the “chosen one” cliché.
Another senseless example of not wanting to really wanting to “go there,” is how the villains are a dubious, greedy Blackwater-style military contractor seeking to exploit alien technologies, not a real government agency. If one is going to be bold enough to use apartheid as your major allegory, why not stay true to reality and have government be the ultimate villain behind it all? The South African government granted “honorary white status” and is to blame for the under-education and poverty that allowed the AIDS epidemic to spread so widely there. The South African government jailed Nelson Mandela and went so far as to develop nuclear weapons to deal with their border wars. It was an easy out to have a trigger-happy jerk (employed by the evil father-in-law) act as an antagonist rather than delve into the more interesting gray area of a soldier doing his or her job in oppressing the Prawns and going after Wikus.
The film also inserts a large number of slap-stick and gross out qualities, but never really needs them. If it had achieved the level of seriousness it presents itself as having, it might have require exploding bodies or barfing black liquid onto a cake to lighten the mood. But because it wasn’t exactly thoughtful, it just comes off as gratuitous. The film doesn’t comment on human nature or race relations or even friendship despite having a conceptual angle that screams that it should. It’s not brilliant; it’s genre fare that starts off bold and runs around cherry-picking points of focus aimlessly until it’s over.
