August 13, 2009

• Xenophobia and Racism Drive the Plot in District 9

  It’s an audacious premise…A rudderless mother-ship drifts to a halt above the city of Johannesburg 20 years ago, 10-foot-tall extraterrestrials with wormy-looking nose tendrils, exposed stomach organs and kangaroo-like legs have eked out an existence in a government-sanctioned “District 9” enclave.

  A weapons conglomerate Multi-National United is hired to export the aliens, who are reviled by the city’s human population, to a new encampment 200 miles away in the middle of nowhere. Apartheid all over again and how ironic the location is Johannesburg.
  
  Granted, it’s an outlandish concept, but first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp plays his reality-tinged angle to the hilt. He and cinematographer Trent Opaloch stitch together fake corporate video outtakes, documentary-style talking-head interviews, surveillance camera footage, home movies and repurposed TV news reports to follow Wikus’ bizarre journey from racism to compassion.

  Unlike most glossy sci-fi fantasies, there’s not a single shot of the galaxies in District 9, and the filmmaker makes only minimal use of the gleaming high-tech accoutrements that typically sell the idea of superior intelligence from outer space. Instead, these aliens wear raggedy secondhand clothes, forage for cat food and act like any other sentient creature forced to live in barbed-wire ghettos — they’re tough, resourceful and cranky.

  Shooting the action scenes in an actual Soweto slum, Blomkamp underscores his politically charged message about xenophobia, racism and apartheid: The aliens’ spaceship, mechanical exo-suits and enormous hovercraft may be pure science fiction, but the District 9 battleground is regrettably grounded in the kind of hard-nosed politics and corporate avarice seen routinely on the nightly news.

  Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell embed their alien vérité story with a central conflict: The extraterrestrials possess mind-boggling weaponry that would make a fortune for Multi-National United. The complication: Only operators with alien DNA can use the technology.

  Meanwhile, aliens have concocted a fluid that could fuel a return to their faraway home. A reckless search of an alien lab leads to a variety of brutal medical experiments that evoke Abu Ghraib by way of David Cronenberg.

  District 9 ultimately achieves liftoff on the strength of the unsettling metaphor threaded throughout the reality-based spectacle. To paraphrase Pogo: “We have met the aliens, and they are us.”
  
  Today’s District 9, Soweto?

  Go see this, it is definitely interesting.

  • 10:18 pm
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