District 9 (2009) Review

Official trailer

A ship stops over Johannesburg in 1982 and never moves again. The occupants are malnourished, leaderless and unwelcome, and twenty-eight years later they’re living in a fenced camp that the city wants relocated further out.

The 9 is for worldbuilding that arrives entirely through logistics. Nobody explains the situation. You learn it from eviction paperwork, from a cat food black market, from the tone a bureaucrat uses when he speaks to somebody he doesn’t consider a person. District 9 grabs me in the first twenty minutes and keeps its grip until it trades its nerve for a mech suit. I think the eviction material is some of the sharpest science fiction filmmaking of its decade, and Copley’s Wikus is a lead I’d put against anyone’s in the genre.

The point I withhold is for the final act. That converts a documentary about administration into a firefight with a mech suit. It’s a well-staged firefight and the transition is abrupt enough that you can feel the film changing genre underneath you.

The World Arrives Through Paperwork

The film opens as a mockumentary. Talking heads, archive footage, a corporate video introducing Wikus van de Merwe as he leads an eviction team into the camp.

What that format buys is a way to deliver twenty-eight years of history without a single scene of exposition between characters. The interviews establish the timeline, the news footage establishes public feeling, and the surveillance cameras establish that everything here’s watched and recorded. Then the film’s main work happens in the eviction itself. Wikus goes shack to shack with a clipboard, obtaining signatures from creatures who can’t read the form, explaining that this constitutes consent. The horror is entirely procedural and it’s completely legible without commentary. That clipboard scene is where I decided I liked the film. Wikus is cheerful, polite and completely monstrous, and the film never nudges you to notice. I find it harder to sit through than any of the gore that comes later. That’s the technique the film runs on. Nobody says the word apartheid. The title comes from District Six in Cape Town, the audience is in Johannesburg, and the film trusts that a fence, a form and a relocation order will accomplish what a speech would ruin.

The economy of the camp does the rest.

There’s a Nigerian gang selling cat food at extortionate prices because the prawns will trade anything for it. There’s a subcontracted security firm doing the evictions because the state has outsourced them. Neither arrangement is explained and both are instantly familiar to anybody who has looked at how these places really work.

Wikus Is Not Likeable and That Is the Design

Sharlto Copley had never acted professionally. He was a friend of Blomkamp’s who had produced the original short, and much of his dialogue was improvised on location.

The performance works because Wikus is unpleasant for the first third. He’s a smug middle manager who got the job through his father in law, he burns a shack full of eggs and jokes about the popping sound, and he speaks to the aliens in the voice people use with difficult toddlers.

Then the film makes him the protagonist and refuses to redeem him on schedule. When he starts transforming he doesn’t become sympathetic to the prawns. He becomes desperate to stop being one, and he betrays Christopher Johnson at the point where a conventional script would have him turn.

His eventual decency is bought at enormous cost and arrives late and partial. That’s why it works. The film’s argument is that prejudice isn’t cured by understanding, it’s cured by having no remaining alternative, and even then only sometimes.

Copley plays all of it at a pitch of ordinary. Wikus is never grand and never articulate. He whines, he panics, he lies badly, and when he finally does the decent thing he does it while complaining. A more dignified performance would have made the argument easier to dismiss. Copley is the reason the rating sits this high for me. Putting a whiny, cowardly middle manager at the center of a film and never sanding him down takes nerve, and it’s sharp that his one decent act arrives with complaining attached.

Thirty Million Dollars in a Real Township

Made for thirty million dollars, the film was shot on location in Chiawelo, Soweto. The shacks aren’t a set. The residents in the background are residents. That decision does two things at once. It gives the film a physical texture that a built environment can’t fake, and it collapses the distance between the fictional situation and the actual one. A viewer who knows nothing about South African history can still see that this place exists.

The effects work is the other half of the achievement. Christopher Johnson is a fully realized digital character carrying an entire emotional arc, produced for a fraction of what a studio would have spent, and he’s convincing because the film keeps him in the same grainy handheld frame as everything else.

Christopher Johnson is the character I care about most in the film, and I still find it hard to believe he’s a digital creation made on this budget.

Peter Jackson produced. Blomkamp had been attached to a Halo adaptation that collapsed, and he built District 9 out of the wreckage of that, from his own 2005 short Alive in Joburg. It cost less than the marketing budget of most films it competed with and made over two hundred million dollars.

The Third Act Changes Genre

For roughly seventy minutes this is a film about bureaucracy, bodies and desperation. Then Wikus gets into a mech suit and the last stretch becomes an action climax with bodies bursting.

I understand the reasoning. The film has established alien weaponry that only prawn biology can work, so a weaponized finale is planted in advance. It also gives Wikus the one thing the story needs from him. That’s a choice made at maximum cost with nothing in it for him.

My objection is tonal. The mockumentary opening trained the audience for a film that observes, and the ending is a film that stages. The pleasure on offer changes from unease to spectacle, and unease was the rarer commodity.

It’s still the most defensible version of a compromise. Compare it to almost any other science fiction film with this much on its mind, most of which either refuse the climax entirely and frustrate the audience, or start compromising in the first act.

Why It Worked and Why Nothing Copied It

District 9 was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, which for a science fiction film with no stars and a first-time director is close to unheard of. The obvious lesson the industry drew was that gritty handheld science fiction was commercial, and several films followed that looked similar and worked considerably less well. What they copied was the camera.

What they didn’t copy is harder. Blomkamp was filming a place he grew up in, about its own history, with a specific argument, and the aesthetic followed from that. The handheld grain is a consequence of the approach and not the approach itself.

Blomkamp’s own later films are the clearest evidence. Elysium and Chappie carry the same visual signature and the same production team and neither has the same footing, because neither is standing on ground the director knows in his body. There’s a version of this observation that sounds like a rule about writing what you know, and that’s not quite it. Blomkamp didn’t know anything about alien refugees. He knew what a fence in Johannesburg looks like, what the paperwork sounds like, and how a person talks to somebody he’s decided doesn’t count.

Should you watch District 9?

Yes, and pay close attention to the first twenty minutes. The film is remembered for the mech suit and the arm, and what I admire most is a man with a clipboard obtaining signatures from people who can’t read the form and calling that consent.

The ending costs it a point, because I’d have traded the firefight for another half hour of that unease. Everything before it justifies the 9 easily.

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