2009

DIRECTOR: NEILL BLOMKAMP PRODUCERS: PETER JACKSON AND CAROLYNNE CUNNINGHAM SCREENPLAY: NEILL BLOMKAMP AND TERRI TATCHELL STARRING: SHARLTO COPLEY (WIKUS VAN DE MERWE), JASON COPE (CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON/GREY BRADNAM), DAVID JAMES (COLONEL KOOBUS VENTER), VANESSA HAYWOOD (TANIA SMIT-VAN DE MERWE), MANDLA GADUKA (FUNDISWA MHLANGA), EUGENE KHUMBANYIWA (OBESANDJO)

District 9

TRISTAR • COLOR, 112 MINUTES

A South African bureaucrat forms an uneasy relationship with a race of insectlike aliens forced into a squalid containment zone.

The District 9 internment camp

With his first feature film, director Neill Blomkamp brought a staggering realism to science fiction by presenting an alien invasion in the guise of a found-footage mockumentary. Smart, abrasive, and laced with satirical humor, District 9 is an in-your-face assault on xenophobia set in a filthy, violent ghetto in Johannesburg, South Africa. When the giant mother ship arrives and hovers ominously in the polluted air, its stranded space travelers are forced by the government into an encampment that soon becomes rife with gangsters, weapons, and underworld dealings (an aesthetic described by Blomkamp as “bad Star Wars”). The tale is told in a series of interviews and vignettes seemingly captured on tape like a news or reality program, grounding the unbelievable in a hard-edged reality that’s almost too believable for comfort.

Blomkamp, a native of Johannesburg, first visited the concept in his 2006 short film Alive in Joburg, a six-minute prototype of District 9 that grew out of his desire to see “Western science fiction placed in southern Africa,” he said in 2009. Based on the strength of his short, Blomkamp managed to get Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson to produce the feature version scripted by Blomkamp and his wife, Terri Tatchell. Like Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953) and the 1988 film Alien Nation, District 9 uses the sci-fi premise of aliens landing on Earth to question the way our civilization sometimes behaves toward minority groups and the underprivileged. It can be viewed as a direct metaphor for District Six—a notorious Cape Town residential area whose population was forcibly evicted during the 1960s under the apartheid regime—or as a criticism of “segregation and xenophobia in general,” Blomkamp has said.

Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe

Neill Blomkamp on the set with Sharlto Copley

The alien Christopher Johnson

Derogatorily referred to as “prawns” because of their bottom-feeder behavior and clawed, crustacean-like appearance, the aliens in the film are sophisticated CGI creations that blend seamlessly into their gritty environment. Through their squidlike mouths, they speak a language of guttural clicks. They’re ugly, smelly, and repulsive to humans, and their cuisine of choice is canned cat food. Though the sharpest of the aliens—a male given the hilariously inappropriate name of Christopher Johnson—and his son may be sympathetic, even likable, the prawns as a species are undeniably disgusting, and that’s the idea. Nobody wants them in their neighborhood or on this planet; they don’t want to be here, either. They just want to repair their ship and travel back home. The prawns have managed to build and operate a complex vessel capable of interplanetary travel, and are, in fact, light-years ahead of humans in their technology, making it seem all the more unfair that they’re treated like vermin on Earth.

As smug bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe, Sharlto Copley gives an intense performance, most of which was improvised by the actor to heighten the sense of urgency and realism in his incredible character arc. When Wikus is accidentally exposed to a fluid that mixes his DNA with that of the aliens, he undergoes a gut-wrenching transformation that recalls the mutation in The Fly (1986). But unlike the ill-fated inventor in The Fly, Wikus is instantly abandoned by his company, his wife, and everyone in his life when he begins to mutate. Yet his metamorphosis leads to his unlikely redemption. “As he becomes more alien,” Blomkamp has observed, “he kind of becomes more human.” In the final action sequence, armed with a robotic “exo-suit” that looks like the child of a Transformer and ED-209 from RoboCop (1987), former uptight office worker Wikus has become a full-fledged sci-fi hero.

Shot on location in an actual shanty township in Johannesburg, the sci-fi/horror/mockumentary affects a distinct tone. Its novel mix of the raw and the ridiculous is evident during the scene in which Wikus hands the seven-foot-tall green monster a clipboard and pen, telling him, “We require your scrawl on this eviction notification,” and the signs posted on chain-link fences reading “No non-human loitering.” A deeply critical film with an undercurrent of optimism, District 9 presents a harrowingly close-to-reality scenario of alien-human interaction rarely matched in a century’s worth of science-fiction movies. In 2010, it became the first documentary-style film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (along with three others for Writing, Visual Effects, and Editing), and one of only a handful of sci-fi titles to earn that distinction.

FAR-OUT FACTS

Leading man Sharlto Copley was not a professional actor, but a high school friend of Neill Blomkamp who made his film debut in Alive in Joburg.

Instead of acting with a stick waved in front of a green screen, Copley performed his scenes with actor Jason Cope playing the part of Christopher. In post-production, Cope was erased from the shots and the alien was painted in.

Neill Blomkamp was first inspired to make a sci-fi movie when he saw Jurassic Park (1993) at age thirteen.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

Wikus, injured in a raid on District 9, is having his hand examined by a doctor. When the bloody bandage is removed, to Wikus’s horror and dismay, a large black lobster claw is revealed. At this point, the film takes on a new dimension of “body horror,” a subplot about a man falling apart and restructuring into another being.

KEEP WATCHING

ALIEN NATION (1988)

ELYSIUM (2013)