Movie Review: District 9 (2009, Directed by Neill Blomkamp)

District 9 is essentially a B-level alien movie with a conscious. Like many of the beloved low-budget sci-fi/horror films of the 1950s (The Blob, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.) South African director Neill Blomkamp’s debut film attempts to engage with some of today’s pressing social issues while simultaneously giving the audience a fun experience. At times, it succeeds. At other times, Blomkamp tries too hard to inject “Significance” into a film whose second half focuses primarily on “blowing things up real good.”

If you’ve been to a major film or watched any television in the last few months, chances are you have seen the trailer for District 9. The basic plot is revealed in the promotional materials for the film, but here’s a quick re-cap: A race of aliens have made contact with Earth. The creatures are quarantined by the South African government in a ghetto known as District 9. Sharlto Copley plays a field operative named Wikus van der Merwe, who works for a private company charged with controlling the aliens. Multi-National United (MNU) has an interest in trying to figure out how to make the aliens’ technologically-advanced weapons work. Copley is arrogant and timid at the same time as he goes about the business of moving the aliens out of District 9. However, Copley undergoes an unexpected, accidental physical transformation that has profound implications for him, his fellow humans, and the alien race.

District 9 is to be commended on a number of fronts. First-time actor Sharlto Copley is refreshingly nuanced in the lead performance. He brings out the many shades of van der Merwe’s personality, from intolerance to selfishness, from arrogance to helplessness, from ignorance to timidity. In addition, the special effects in Blomkamp’s movie work quite beautifully most of the time. He succeeds in creating a world that is both believable (the backdrop of Johannesburg is authentic) and creatively creepy (the aliens are quite disturbing to look at throughout the movie). At the very least, Blomkamp has succeeded in creating a mildly thought provoking summer entertainment.

The problem is that the film is not nearly as profound as it pretends to be. District 9 is obviously meant to be read as an allegory encompassing contemporary issues of apartheid, racism, “ghettoization,” and cultural arrogance. The attempt at engaging the audience in important issues is commendable. Blomkamp’s screenplay just lacks the subtlety needed to explore these social problems with the complexity appropriate to such large subjects.

The other major problem is the entire second half of the movie. While I found the first half heavy-handed in its approach to apartheid and other political travesties, the second half condescended to the hackneyed clichés of summer action pictures. It’s almost as if the director lost interest in the deep issues he raised in the first half, and decided to just blow things up for an hour or so.

In District 9, we have a wonderful idea for a movie. I would love to see the short film upon which the full-length movie was purportedly based. I have a feeling it might not suffer from the same overbloatedness that plagued much of the complete film. Nevertheless, Blomkamp is off to an interesting start, and I’m anxious to see what he’ll do next. Actor Sharlto Copley has a similarly bright future ahead of him. Now he needs to star in a movie that has a better understanding of what it’s trying to be.