This is a very interesting sci-fi film about an alien spacecraft that comes to Johannesburg, South Africa. After a long time of the ship just hovering over the city, humas go into it and discover aliens living aboard with no clear leadership. They are asked to go town to the surface and live in a walled ghetto/shanty town on the outskirts of Jo'burg. After 20 years of living side by side, it's clear the aliens don't have any drive to do anything at all. They eat canned cat food, they collect and make guns and bombs and they trade items with Nigerian black market mobsters for more cat food. They can be erratic as neighbors and enjoy setting fires and destroying things in the human world - not for an agenda, but just for fun.
At this point, the South African private firm that has been given the contract to monitor and guard against the aliens has to move them from their enclave of District 9 to a new area, District 10, hundreds of miles away in the desert. When the firm goes in to the area to give the aliens notice, they're met with angry reactions and lots of violence. The leader of the human mission is sprayed with some alien substance that slowly changes him into an alien.
The story is fresh and wonderful and totally embraces the violent and despicable apartheid history of South Africa and it's townships as well as its current situation of mass immigration from poorer northern countries. The white humans in the movie are very hard to trust and the director, Neil Blomkamp, uses this idea well. We don't know if we don't like the whites Afrikaaners because we don't trust any of them ever since apartheid or because they are bad people in this situation.
The aliens, on the other hand, are harder to like than every-day humans because they look different and we assume they are all violent and unpredictable. Yet, when they are served with eviction notices and told to pack up and move to District 10, their reactions are very human and we easily feel pity for them. That there's a black market (including inter-species prostitution) in the district is only a sign of the poverty and loss of hope that must run through the area. The symbolism is clear here that the massive imprisonment of large populations of poor people with no voice in South Africa is bad.
The style of the film is very clever too. Much of the story is told though a faux-documentary style where the main human is showing a film crew how one rounds up aliens and lays down the law. There are news-like interviews with 'experts' and witnesses to the action. These sequences are inter-cut with faux-news footage of the scenes, as seen from helicopters covering the story. This format makes it very easy to buy the story. It doesn't raise many questions or issues because it is so earnest and sticks so strongly to the conceit that this is real history.
I think the story does lose its way a bit in the second act, and I also don't love that there's an alien child who plays a pivotal role in the ultimate storyline (I generally think kids in movies are cheap and corny and would have much preferred the actions of this kid done by a grown alien). Overall this is a fresh idea that is very politically interesting and visually lots of fun. The military gear and machines (like big Humvee trucks) and the alien guns all look great.
Stars: 3 of 4
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree mostly. I found the story very absorbing and of course it's a fascinating way of looking anew at apartheid. Except for dropping the ball a tad towards the end when our protagonist goes through some big emotional changes I don't quite buy, it was thoroughly fun. I loved how the "hero" is basically a Brownie a la Hurricane Katrina (a hapless bureaucrat) who we grow to identify with. Creepy, disturbing, absorbing -- very original and an accomplishment for all its flaws.
ReplyDelete