It's amazing what $30 million will get you these days

Rating: Null/10 (24 September 2009)

Transformers 2, The Dark Knight and Avatar. Just three action films from 2009 yet each with budgets believed to be in excess of $200 million dollars.
It's got to be pretty frustrating to the producers of those movies, if not their directors, that Neill Blomkamp has managed to create something that is, visually at least, every bit the CGI equal of those blockbusters (I admit Avatar isn't out yet but could it EVER be worth ten times as much as Distric 9?). Not only that but Blomkamp manages it with his first feature length film. It's an extraordinary achievement and one that shows that Peter Jackson, the producer and father figure to this experiment, is as good a pick of directorial talent as he is of actors.
Perhaps it was the fact that Jackson went from The Frighteners and Beautiful Creatures to Lord of the Rings that gave him the belief that Blomkamp was similarly talented and could handle the enormous transition he faced? Regardless, Jackson gave his protégé the keys to the sweetshop, not once but twice: signing Blomkamp to create the video game adaptation of Halo, which fell through through no fault of the director, after which Jackson gave his new friend $30 million and told him to make whatever he wanted! And hasn't the boy done good? It leaves me thinking that his Halo would've been the first ever computer game adaptation worth seeing. But I digress.
What is undoubted is the fact that Blomkamp has incredible vision as well as a brilliant realisation of the strengths and weaknesses of CGI. His entire film is saturated with effects shots - every single one of the aliens is computer generated, but there is hardly a moment when you're left thinking how fake it all looks, which is so unlike most modern action blockbusters, particularly Wolverine, shot earlier this summer for a vastly bigger budget yet with numerous eye jarring moments of hideously obvious CG. In District 9 the other worldly stuff is done by computer, everything else is real, especially the slums. That natural look underpins the story of the film, forcing us to notice how a movie about aliens in Joburg is actually a thinly veiled expose on the system of Apartheid in South Africa. A scene were the lead character goes into a Burger King equivalent sums this up perfectly - he marches to the empty, white only till while the numerous black people queue up.
Blomkamp also realises that the plot is the essential aspect of any film and his is a simple but well crafted thing. His everyman Wikus Van De Merwe is a petty bureaucrat, albeit one with a lovely wife, working for the company that is tasked with regulating the aliens that have landed, of all places, in South Africa. I believe Wikus isn't racist, or species-ist, as such, he just doesn't think of the aliens, or prawns as they look and are nicknamed, as the equal of human beings. He therefore feels no compassion for them in the slightest, a fact best demonstrated by his happy narration of a prawn 'abortion' - the burning by fire of several dozen alien eggs. He even laughs when we start to hear a popping sound. 'That's the eggs exploding' he explains with a broad smile.
In this he represents the typical white South African during Apartheid, or white and ethnically 'pure' German during the 1930's, or anyone else who's sat back and done nothing as extremists declaring their inherent superiority over other forms of life, including human life, rise into positions of absolute power. He doesn't necessarily condone the sub-human way the aliens are forced to live, but he would do absolutely nothing to change it, ignoring the things that he witnesses being done to the prawns and which he knows, in his heart, are being done far from where he can see. It's not a big jump to imagine the experiments he eventually discovers being done being translated to Nazi scientists performing their obscene tests on the Jews and other guests of their concentration camps.
This dichotomy in Wikus is crudely interrupted when he becomes exposed to an alien substance. It occurs during the serving, en mass, of 1.8 million eviction notices to the entire population of prawns, but that is not Wikus' big concern at the end of the day. No, it's his fast developing illness that worries him, especially when he begins to realise he is changing into one of the aliens! Throughout most of the film he is desperate only to be cured of what he views as an affliction. It is only in the latter stages, when he finally realises that his problem is his attitude rather than his mutating DNA, that he becomes a hero, as a pose to a villain.
This immense transition is handled unbelievably well by first time actor Sharlto Copley, a South African native who plays Wikus perfectly. Such a first time performance hasn't been seen since a young Edward Norton burst on the scene in Primal Fear and Copley deserves every plaudit going for his incredible job, though it's doubtful that a first timer helming a science fiction action movie starring an unknown, who is also a first timer, will win many awards come March.
That would be a shame and a missed opportunity. Distric 9 shows us what a good story, excellent direction, fantastic acting (from the lead at least) and a budget of just $30 million can actually get you. It is worth seeing just for that alone, Senors Bay, Cameron, Silver and Weinstein. It is also worth seeing because it's a brilliant film.