I just returned from seeing District 9, and if my inability to shut up about it is any clue, then it’s a movie I have to write about, too.
The collision of Hollywood and thoughtful science fiction yields a lot of failures and pretentious crap. Only rarely do we get a Day the Earth Stood Still, Blade Runner, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, or Andromeda Strain. What you often get instead are pretentious bores like The Fountain, or misguided adaptations of classic stories like I, Robot and I Am Legend. We won’t talk about The Happening.
District 9 has a lot on its mind, but it doesn’t pose as a film that values cogitation over cliche. By just thinking aloud — albeit with exquisitely directed and edited deftness — the movie practically invites us to talk to it, about it, to form an opinion every step of the way — without providing any help. Although there is an efficient surfeit of exposition, this movie is scornful of too much information. Let me explain.
Early in the movie, Neill Blomkamp borrows and extends a technique Robert Zemeckis began to perfect in Contact: using the cable-news metaphor of talking heads to convey lots of information 21st Century TV-watchers can digest with lightning speed. The benefit of this is that he can actually just explain stuff without having to do the hard work of creatively exposing (or is that progressively disclosing?) information the way, say, Brian DePalma or Stanley Kubrick would have preferred — like an IV drip. But after the expositional setup — so original, we don’t care that we’re being talked to documentary style — the movie shifts gears, relying more and more on what we learn from how humans and aliens relate to each other. No more explaining — it’s like the difference between being told there is mayhem and standing in the middle of it.
I haven’t even talked about the movie’s subject. Where do I begin? Enslavement. Persecution. Prejudice. Profit. Power at gunpoint. The hopelessness of poverty. Bureaucratic thugishness, sloppiness, and insensitivity. The unavoidable irony of what constitutes conscience and altruism. Voodoo. Cat food. Liars. It’s also about the relationship between such themes and the fun a filmmaker can have realizing them on the screen. Exploding viscera, decapitations, maulings, murders, beatings, bombings, shootings, and taserings. Then there are wicked alien weapons, a robotic exoskeleton even, and the omnipresent wonder of a dead and hovering spaceship the size of a small city.
Nor have I talked about its two central characters. One is a moral clod, oblivious for much of the movie to his own complicity in the story’s almost unbearable buildup to payoff. The other is a father with more humanity beneath his chitin than in every other human in the movie combined. It sometimes feels misanthropic, until well after the movie is over and you realize that the alienness of the aliens is no more than spice in a conversation about different kinds of people.