Diversity Day

Traditionally I hate movies that identify "racism" as their central theme. It's something that's been done hundreds of times and there's really very little territory that hasn't been mined, strip-mined and blown to pieces with a bunch of miners trapped inside.

Anyone who has been educated has been taught to treat other races with dignity, despite whatever feelings you have towards them. It's something that we've all figured out by grade school and it's not something that needs to be explored anymore.

There's something peripheral to that hackneyed theme that District 9 explores: our fear and distrust of things we don't understand and the way a simple language barrier can give us an asshole sense of superiority.

And District 9 never gives easy answers to these problems.

Also I think that the real theme of the film is the unifying power of cat food.

For those of you who don't know, District 9 is a part fictional documentary, part narrative feature about an alien spaceship that has been stalled in Johannesburg, South Africa for twenty years. Alien affairs have been handed over to a private organization called MNU, who have ferried the aliens off the ship and into a shantytown below. There, the aliens, called by the derogatory "prawn", have developed a society with a group of Nigerian criminals who are hoping to learn how to operate the advanced alien weaponry.

Our lead is an MNU officer named Wikus who is in charge of an operation to move the aliens to a smaller, isolated and heavily guarded location away from the general population. There he comes in contact with an alien contaminant that has strange and sickening effects. I won't go any further than that, because the twists and turns the plot goes through are one of the chief pleasures of the film.

It's weird to get good performances out of entirely CGI characters that speak in an alien language with no discernable emotions, so by using CGI not just well, (like so few films do) but extraordinarily well the film immediately endeared itself to me.

This is the sort of filmmaking that makes me wonder if the director had to negotiate with the devil (trade some PAs' souls or something) to give these characters life. This is the SECOND film this summer to use a small budget (District 9 was shot on $30 million) to outclass the big-budget films that cost the studio executives their first-born children and all their body hair to make, and which would probably have a hard time turning a profit against a budget inflated enough to keep Paris Hilton busy for a week. Every alien in the film is CGI-rendered and they all look fantastic.

The lead performance is great, the direction is excellent and would never suggest that Neil Blomkamp hadn't been directing films for decades and the script is quite strong.

What's most interesting to me is the way the aliens are treated by humans. Despite their pretentions towards giving them a safe place to live, they constantly raid and harrass them, don't accommadate their lifestyle and in one scene, burn down a nest to keep the prawns from being born, all the while laughing and joking.

But what's new about that? The interesting part is that they don't paint the aliens as victims. The best example I can give is a scene where an alien starts to pull apart a tire, and as the cameraman explains that the aliens like to eat tires because of the texture, a soldier walks up and begins to prod the alien. Wikus shouts not to prod the alien, but it's too late. The alien grabs the soldier and tears his arms off.

With behavior like that, it's not surprising that the general population fears and distrusts the aliens, and it's not unreasonable for them to want them sent somewhere that they'll never see them again. Despite one species' extreme mistreatment of the other, it's hard to sympathize with either side. Even Wicus is a scheming, selfish bigot who only has a small revelation at the end, fueled by his own selfish, but understandable reasons.

It's not all perfect, though. I'm not convinced that the documentary aspect worked all that well, or was necessary in the least, considering how schizophrenic the viewers window into the story tends to be (sometimes we're watching it through the lens of a documentarian, other times we are watching it from a third party perspective like a regular movie).

In the end, though, the film has a great story and that can do a lot to work against some unsuccesful narrative choices. The effects work is simply spectacular given the budget. It's a lot of fun watching how the alien society would operate under those conditions and how people would react to the situation. It's very believable and compelling, and we're all expecting great things from Mr. Neil Blomkamp.

8/10