ReWatch: District 9

2009, Neill Blomkamp (Gran Turismo) -- Amazon

Yup, my love of Neill Blomkamp all started with this movie, which I never wrote about before, and haven't watched in about a decade.

Weird; not a single Blomkamp post from Kent.

I have been doing a lot of rewatching, primarily to combat the "meh" reaction -- if I watch something I know I already enjoy then I will enjoy it again. But also because of the self-imposed, if I watch it, I have to write about it. Too many hiatus-i has added self-imposed weight to that ideal. But with rewatches the self-imposed ideal doesn't always apply. Sure, there is a tag, but that doesn't mean I have to write about every rewatch I do. That path would surely lead to madness.

Nuff self-justification there?

Anywayz, I never wrote about this pre-Blog movie before, likely because I haven't rewatched it a lot in the past 15 years or so. To be honest, I was kind of holding out for the expected sequel. It never happened. After the much maligned Chappie, Blomkamp never seemed to have recovered in the eyes of the public. He did a ton of short films, many via his Oats Studio, and has briefly returned with some outside of (usual) genre flicks. But I am not sure we will ever see the sequel, nor his return to proper robot-propelled scifi. One can hope.

District 9 takes on the format of a semi-mock-umentary, interspersing a news-style story of how low-level bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, The A-Team) becomes an alien, literally. The movie postulates that in 1982 an alien spacecraft came to settle over Johannesburg, South Africa. Onboard the ship were a horribly treated worker species, and no signs of what happened to the owners/pilots of the craft and why it showed up at Earth. Not sure how to deal with the million plus bug-like aliens, they do what good humans like to do (most notably, more recently, see Gator Gitmo), and relocate the "prawns" to slum shanty towns. Twenty years later, with little to no understanding and no input from the rest of the world, nobody, prawn (the aliens are never actually given a non-pejorative name) or JoBurg resident, is happy with the situation.

The movie begins with van de Merwe assigned to a resettlement action. They are issuing "evictions" to the ramshackle shacks the prawns live in. Most don't understand, many react violently. The humans are armed to the teeth. But one, who goes by the name Christopher Johnson, has been working on something. Obviously smarter than the average prawn, he has a lost shuttle buried under his shack and he has been processing minute amounts of some sort of liquid for the last twenty years. When van de Merwe tears apart his shack, having discovered a ton of mysterious technology, he is sprayed by the liquid. And it begins... changing him. Not immediately, but not long after, he begins his own Kafka story.

District 9 did a brilliant job of mashing together so many ideas. Social satire, actual comedy, body horror and scifi actioner all come together, as van de Merwe tries to desperately find a way to stop what is happening with his body, and also survive the human response to it -- which is almost immediately intended to be fatal. The people in charge here are the Bad Guys. The effects stand up, startingly so, and its easy to be lost in the visuals between the overly-complicated alien bodies and the real world environments. Blomkamp loves his practical effects as well, as the details applied to the alien weaponry is apparent, even right down to the colour schemes chosen. 

After all these years, I am still astounded with how gripping the movie is, how effective the commentary on how inhuman we can be is. In reality, the alien we use to justify horrors doesn't have to be much. And while I still wish there had been a sequel, I am not sure I could ever be satisfied with what would be produced.