district 9

[intertribal]

I was excited to see District 9 since I first saw the trailer online, months ago.  I tracked down the rest of Neill Blomkamp's stuff - this is his first full-length feature - Alive in Joburg is the short movie that this one is based on.  I recommend it.  Know what you're getting into.  I felt an immediate kinship to this movie, but I can imagine a lot of people will be reading reviews that don't really express what this movie's about.  The Lincoln Journal Star reviewer called it "the best studio picture of the summer" and basically led readers to believe that it's like Transformers, only better.  Thus, the theater was packed when I went.  So let me say from the get-go: this is not Transformers.  At all.

I would say, "if you want Transformers then you can have your fucking Transformers!" but I must resist that urge.  I hope everyone sees District 9, on the off-chance that it will make some people's think about a bunch of moral issues at play in contemporary politics.  And, you know, just in life in general.

The set-up is pretty well gleaned from the trailer: a huge alien ship has become stranded above Johannesburg.  The aliens inside were malnourished.  The South African government decided to set up a humanitarian refugee camp, District 9, for the aliens.  Twenty years later, the aliens are still in the camp (the ship is broken), but South Africans have become tired of living with aliens - especially since District 9 has devolved into an unregulated slum where the aliens trade weapons for cat food and some superstitious gangsters have decided that alien meat will "cure high blood pressure if you boil it, cure diabetes, all diseases".  Overwhelmed, South Africa contracts the job of evicting the aliens from District 9 into a farther-away District 10 (that's even more like a concentration camp) to Multi-National United (a Blackwater look-alike with some Lockheed Martin thrown in).  The son-in-law of the boss, weak-spined Wilkus Van Der Meewe, gets a nepotistic promotion and is put in charge of the eviction process.  While evicting the aliens (armed with a clipboard and some annoying babytalk that quickly becomes "is that your little fucker?" type of language when his authority is even mildly challenged), Wilkus finds a tube of black alien-made fluid - their fuel, in which their DNA is embedded - and accidentally squirts it in his own face.  Vomiting ensues.  Black goo comes out his nose.  An alien scratches his arm and after his wife hurries him to the doctor, the arm emerges from its cast as an alien arm.  Uh-oh.  Meanwhile, an alien bizarrely named Christopher Johnson is trying to get the fuel back and protect his son from MNU security forces by being polite when MNU comes knocking, apologizing for his son throwing some plastic thing at Wilkus. 

Okay, I'm about to regurgitate the whole movie here.  Suffice it to say that this is not Transformers. 

No, this movie is achingly, harrowingly realistic - from MNU, solely interested in making alien weaponry functional (it relies on alien DNA), to the gangsters, who like all post-colonial powermongers want to consume power in order to harness it, to yes, the sympathetic protagonists.  They too are selfish, desperate, willing to make terrible compromises, stunned by pain, stunned by their intrinsic connection to other lifeforms.  The fact that it's set in Johannesburg instead of New York makes it very easy to draw out all the unpleasant bullshit that is guaranteed to happen - and which, in fact, does happen on a smaller scale - if aliens ever were to get stuck on Earth.  Blomkamp didn't pull any of this out of thin air.  The horrible, brutal things humans do to the residents of District 9 - and to each other - is the stuff we do to wild animals, illegal immigrants, terrorism suspects, "civilian bystanders," sick people, poor people, all the fucking time.  I think that's what makes parts of this movie so hard to watch - you're sitting there squirming because what's being thrown at you is all the atrocities you've been taught to accept as "just the way it is," as "necessary" - just like it was necessary to carpet-bomb Cambodia during the Vietnam War.  You know.  Necessary.  Sensible.  Sometimes hard decisions need to be made, and all that bullshit. 

And District 9 pulls no punches in that regard.  It puts you right there in the blood and gore and vomit and shrapnel and tears, the collateral damage that comes along with such "necessary" actions.  There is no hiding here.  There is no looking away.  You must watch your fellow beings destroying each other, getting cut apart or blown apart, threatening each other's children, abandoning each other... and rescuing each other.  There are hard-fought moments of understanding and kindness amid all the ugliness.  But only a few.  For the most part, District 9 adheres to the Catch-22 interpretation of the world: "mobs with clubs were in control everywhere."  It hurts because it's true.