Alien Nation meets Waiting for Guffman meets The Fly

Rating: 2/10 (3 June 2010)

Right away 'District 9', with the giant alien mother ship hovering in the sky, reminded me of the earlier movie and TV series 'Alien Nation'. That TV Series actually was an improvement over the original movie as the characters had some wonderful idiosyncrasies and you could easily identify with them as they represented a new (and also familiar) ethnic group. Not so with District 9. The aliens look part insect, part crab and have an unintelligible language consisting mainly of clicks and other weird sounds (somehow the aliens can easily understand English but we viewers must watch subtitles; it's not very clear whether humans in the story can understand the 'prawns' very well—you never see any interpreters assisting any of the soldiers when they enter District 9 and attempt to evict the prawns). Even worse is the fact that the prawns are not a very likable bunch as they are scavengers and as we are informed from the outset, constantly committing crimes against the human population which leads for the call for them to be relocated.
The first half hour of 'District 9' is devoted to what I would call a mockumentary (similar to the film 'Waiting for Guffman'). The film takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa and various people are interviewed providing the back story of the alien arrival and subsequent colonization on earth. The filmmakers were lucky to find an abandoned shantytown in Soweto where set designers ably created a massive junkyard inhabited by the prawns. During the mockumentary, it's established that some kind of command module floated down to earth from the mother ship but for some reason, after 20 years, it's never been located inside District 9. I would think that if an alien ship actually landed here on earth, there would have been a huge team of international investigators searching for that module and no doubt finding it after a short search.
District 9 becomes more confusing when we're introduced to the protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe. He's a bureaucrat who also happens to be the son-in-law of the director at MNU (Multinational United), the corporate group of military contractors who have been awarded a contract to relocate the prawns to a cleaner district outside of Johannesburg. I could never understand why the company needs to have the prawns EACH sign an eviction notice before being relocated. The explanation is that it's a 'cover' but how could the company possibly have 1.8 million uncooperative creatures sign an agreement? If they kept the operation closed to the public, there would have been no need for those eviction notices. Wikus looks ridiculous traipsing around trying to collect signatures and he's such a buffoon of a character that one wonders if the filmmakers were actually going for comedy toward the beginning of their narrative. Certainly the prawns' ravenous desire for cat food adds to the comedy and a group of Nigerian criminals also get short shrift here too as they have no regrets about living inside the odious District 9 and scamming the prawns for alien weapons (which they don't know how to use) in exchange for cat food.
The mockumentary is pretty much dispensed with as we break into the second act of the story. A prawn and his son have been working for years developing some kind of fuel to power the command module back to the mother ship. Wikus manages to ingest some of the black goo and much like the movie 'The Fly', he grows a prawn hand. The bad guys from MNU (they're all bad!) decide to cut Wikus up and sell his body parts to the highest bidder (there's some mumble jumble talk about how his 50-50 human/prawn DNA will sell very well on the black market). Wikus of course escapes and begs for help from the prawn and his son inside the underground module. The prawn can possibly help him in three years after returning to the mother ship but only if they can get the container containing the black goo from MNU headquarters which Wikus had confiscated when he first found it. Much like Terminator 2, Wikus and the prawn break into the impenetrable building and grab the container, only to be chased by MNU's top killer.
Wikus is then captured by the Nigerians but manages to escape by fitting himself into a giant robotic fighting machine (shades of Transformers and Iron Man!). Our Bad guy killer from MNU manages to finally disable the robot and Wikus falls to the ground almost unconscious. Wikus however is saved when a bunch of prawns rip the MNU guy's head off (fortunately there are no close-ups). Oh yeah—the prawn and his son use the goo to power the module back to the mother ship. Everyone's thrilled when the ship leaves our atmosphere. Back to the mockumentary where we learn the prawns have been resettled.
From a confused and awkward stab at comedy, District 9 tries to get real emotional when Wikus and the Prawn and his son BOND! Suddenly the prawns are actually sensitive creatures and Wikus is a hero for saving them! None of it works, since we haven't been invested in the unsavory Prawns from the beginning nor do we care about Wikus, despite all the pseudo-heroic machinations.
If you watch the extras on the DVD, you'll learn that the script was patched together by the director and a co-writer on the fly and that the director really didn't have much of a clue as to what he was doing as he went along. I'll confess that the editing team saved this movie from being a complete disaster. Nonetheless, it's clear that the filmmakers tried to straddle between the worlds of both comedy and pathos and ended up with a hybrid of pure goofiness.