District 9 (2009) Review

A ship stops over Johannesburg in 1982 and never moves again. The occupants are malnourished, leaderless and unwelcome, and twenty-eight years later they are 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 specific tone a bureaucrat uses when he speaks to somebody he does not consider a person.

The point I withhold is for the final act, which converts a documentary about administration into a firefight with a mech suit. It is 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 is watched and recorded.

Then the real work of the film happens in the eviction itself. Wikus goes shack to shack with a clipboard, obtaining signatures from creatures who cannot read the form, explaining that this constitutes consent. The horror is entirely procedural and it is completely legible without commentary.

That is 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 do the work that a speech would ruin.

The economy of the camp does the rest. There is a Nigerian gang selling cat food at extortionate prices because the prawns will trade anything for it. There is 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 genuinely unpleasant for the first third. He is 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.

The film then makes him the protagonist and refuses to redeem him on schedule. When he starts transforming he does not 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 is why it lands. The film’s argument is that prejudice is not cured by understanding, it is cured by having no remaining alternative, and even then only sometimes.

Copley plays all of it at a specific 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.

Thirty Million Dollars in a Real Township

The film was produced for thirty million dollars and shot on location in Chiawelo, Soweto. The shacks are not 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 cannot 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 is convincing because the film keeps him in the same grainy handheld frame as everything else.

Peter Jackson produced. Blomkamp had been attached to a Halo adaptation that collapsed, and District 9 was built 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 operate, so a weaponized finale is planted, not imported. It also gives Wikus the one thing the story needs from him, which is 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 is 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 a number of films followed that looked similar and worked considerably less well. What they copied was the camera.

What they did not copy is harder. Blomkamp was filming a specific place he grew up in, about a specific 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 subsequent 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 is a version of this observation that sounds like a rule about writing what you know, and that is not quite it. Blomkamp did not 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 has decided does not count.

Should you watch District 9?

Yes, and pay attention to the first twenty minutes. The film is remembered for the mech suit and the arm, and its real achievement is a man with a clipboard obtaining signatures from people who cannot read the form and calling that consent.

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