Mellow Yellow

Rating: 6/10 (7 July 2011)

In "Esthetic and Ethics", a very interesting section of French script doctor Miguel Machalski's book, "The Screenplay", the author reminds us —one more time, because it is often forgotten— that every product of cultural consumption contains ideology. In "District 9", director and scriptwriter Neill Blomkamp tries to cover all bases: what a better center of contradiction, abuse and progress than South Africa, to place a suspended spacecraft above Johannesburg, where whites, blacks and aliens are all victims of the big businessmen of the planet, rulers of the World Organization of Nations (or something like that, a construct that is behind the omnipresent weapon factory MNU), and, after a discouraging ending, Blomkamp adds an even more pessimistic post scriptum, about the growing number of marginalized aliens on Earth, and the trial of the protagonist's assistant, for revealing secret MNU information. But as Machalski adds, "Silence speaks volumes", and besides the denunciation of world powers, organizations of united nations, and weapon manufacturers (generally, lumped together), there is no mention of the worldwide audiovisual industry, the biggest power on planet Earth, capable of the unspeakable —for being impossible to measure. Beyond this, the film is attractive during the first hour, with a style that mixes techniques of musical videos, TV reports and documentaries, and benefited with a cast of practically unknown faces that do not distract from the story. But around minute 64, the memory of "Enemy Mine" surges, and we go back, once again, to the 19th century melodrama, secure, comforting, conformist and reinforcing the status quo.