Review for Humans Only!

Rating: 4/10 (17 August 2009)

I walked into District 9, Niell Blomkamp's eagerly awaited sci-fi film/apartheid allegory, not knowing what to expect. From the advertising campaign that consisted of Jim Crow-like signs that read: for humans only, to the action packed trailer, I was curious to see if Blomkamp could successfully incorporate both elements. The allegory to the apartheid in South Africa is quite clear for the first hour of the film, especially due to the fact that this all takes place in South Africa. While Blomkamp was successful in creating an interesting allegory, he was not able to make a good, or even interesting film. The first hour of the film is long and boring, features newscasts that tell the audience essential background information, and unfortunately, also tells them what they are seeing. The story is as follows. In 1981, an enormous UFO mothership appeared mysteriously over Johannesburg, and its alien inhabitants, called by humans "Prawns," have since been moved from their airborne craft to a slum, which is controlled by voodoo-practicing African gangsters. The main character is dorky civil servant Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, in a fine performance), who is put in charge of relocating the aliens away from Johannesburg by the company that he works for, Multi-National United (MNU). These plans go awry, however, when Wikus is contaminated with a black alien fluid, and begins transforming into a Prawn. Thus begins his fight with MNU (which secretly craves his newfound ability to use alien weaponry) and an unlikely partnership with a Prawn named Christopher. While this is a fairly interesting story, District 9 takes a long time to set itself up and loses the audience in the process. After all this exposition comes the action packed second half, of which only some is interesting. One of the film's biggest flaws is its inability to explain why the aliens don't resist the humans when they have advanced weaponry that only they can use. While the prawns and the humans speak entirely different languages, they are able to understand each other. Even more confusing, they aren't always able to understand one another. Sometimes there is miscommunication, sometimes not. It's a pity that this wasn't explained within the first hour. But it's a science fiction film, you say, not everything will be realistic! That's correct, but everything has to be believable. If you can somehow get past these inconsistencies, you'll probably be put off by the gruesome nature of the violence. There are many scenes where people explode, and their body parts collide with the screen, and there are many instances in which lots of close-ups of wounded flesh are paraded around for the audience to sink in. If you can sit through all of this, the ending will leave you disappointed. After almost two hours of exposition and subsequent action, the film's conclusion only resolves a small part of the main plot line. This makes it obvious that there will be a sequel, but the question remains, why should I, as a member of the audience, care enough to sit through another film to discover what I already should've been told in the first film? My answer? You shouldn't.