I Saw a Movie: District 9 (2009)

Detail of a cover illustration from The Saint Sees It Through by Leslie Charteris, 1951

Is a movie a success if it makes you feel a combination of giddy excitement and crushing disappointment? Is it a good movie if you enjoy every minute of it but spend a couple hours after it's over untangling the inconsistencies and unanswered questions that were central to the plot? District 9 is a mess and one of the most unlikely blockbuster hits in years, but I'm pretty sure I like it a lot. Who would guess that a low-budget (for a sci-fi thriller) half-mocumentary/half-action-movie set in South Africa, with heavily accented dialogue and a thinly-veiled allegory for Apartheid, would unseat G.I. Joe, a movie with surprisingly good buzz for a brainless action-figure movie, as the number one movie at the box office?

Part of the reason for District 9's initial success must be its creative ad campaign, which pushes the documentary aspect of the movie and includes a lot of footage not found in the movie at all. Peter Jackson's involvement may have been another factor. Late-summer ennui may have contributed as well - after Transformers 2, Terminator Salvation, and G.I. Joe, people were probably looking for something different. And not different in the way that The Time Traveller's Wife is different.

District 9 really is different, and it has a really intriguing set-up. A giant flying saucer has been floating over Johannesburg, South Africa for two decades. When it arrived, it just sat there in the sky until an exploratory team went inside and found it filled with starving, malnourished aliens - tall, long-limbed aliens with a crustacean-like carapace that led the them receiving the derogatory nickname "prawns". The people of South Africa settled the aliens in a camp called District 9 on the outskirts of the city, but in the intervening twenty years the camp has become a shanty town and haven for illegal activities. Our hero is Wikus van der Merwe (worst action hero name ever?), a mid-level bureaucrat at MNU, the private company that has been put in charge of managing the aliens. MNU is planning on moving the aliens to District 10, a new camp far out in the desert, far from any city. Wikus is in charge of delivering eviction notices to the aliens, a dangerous job that requires good diplomatic skills and armed backup. Things begin to go horribly wrong during Wikus' work in District 9, and he ends up with his life in peril, on the run from MNU, Nigerian terrorists, and the aliens he finds that he doesn't really understand at all.

Whoa - I didn't mean to write such a long plot summary. It speaks to how compelling the concept of District 9 is, I guess. Which is where the disappoint comes into the picture. See where my plot summary trails off there? That's exactly where the movie shifts gears and becomes a different animal - the after-the-fact interview segments with experts and news footage from the first third of District 9 disappear in favor of a very linear fugitive-on-the-run plot-line. I knew it was coming, so it wasn't a jarring disappointment to me, but it was still a little big of a letdown. Some things in the second portion of the movie are quite good, including a creepy homage to Cronenberg's The Fly, some pretty impressive special effects, and a decent ending that brings back the high-concept structure of the movie's first portion. Sharlto Copley, who plays Wikus, is quite good in his transition from "Toby from The Office" to a Bruce-Willis-style "man with nothing to lose", and first-time director Neill Blomkamp pulls off some impressive tricks with the tools he has to work with.

I'll admit that District 9 doesn't hang together too well in retrospect - the plot is a mess of holes and problems. I'm kind of surprised that I wasn't rolling my eyes at certain obvious problems at the time, but the plot moves at a pretty fast pace. I'm still excited about District 9, though, and I'm happy that it's doing well, simply because it has ambition and character. If District 9's success means that some original and interesting scripts get green-lit this fall, that makes me happy. Ironically, though, District 9's big opening weekend also means that we'll be seeing District 10 before too long. Look for it in theaters in 2011.

"The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)" by the Mountain Goats