District 9
An apparently at least somewhat advanced alien race that comes to Earth for reasons unknown...and we stick them in the slums of South Africa. This is District 9.
Likely spoilers
No doubt a polarizing film across the boards, as everyone can't seem to decide whether it's a very obvious blanket metaphor apologizing for 46 years of apartheid, or a very obvious blanket metaphor justifying 46 years of apartheid, and for that, it seems to have garnered a lot of acclaim for being a very original concept. Which I'll admit is kind of funny.
I mean, a seemingly advanced alien race comes down to our planet in a giant, rust-streaked beater of a ship, and rather than anyone trying to learn anything from them, or discover new things as a result of their visit..."Oh, well, let's crowd them in the slums and treat them like second-class citizens! Easily the most economically feasible decision we can think of! Because they look like bugs! GET IT!? They're restless and hostile, but FOREIGN, hence very not-nice!"
If it were any more ham-handed, you could put slices of bread around Blomkamp's mitts and call 'em BLTs. But again, are we justifying it or bowing obsequiously in front of it, begging its forgiveness? Well, I have to say that the metaphor only works for the first half of the movie, through most of the documentary segments. Like two relatively subtle action games I can name of off the top of my head --- Velvet Assassin and Assassin's Creed, oddly enough --- the film really doesn't know how to make the film feel climactic, so it clunkily reverts to "I HAVE A MECH AND YOU WILL ALL FEEL MY WRATH!" in the end, and I feel the film suffers overall for it.
But I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.
I have to admit to finding the abrupt and near-constant shifts in tone from documentary-news-report style filming to straight-up-action-explosion pretty interesting, if a tich jarring. I do not apologize for this being mayhaps the highest praise I can appear to give it.
This is the story of Vikers, a man who is, without question, the friendly face of a corporation that would feel better without one. He's in charge of seeing to it that the huge biped bugs that have been put in slums are evicted and experimented on or, failing that, killed. He spends his time walking from door to door with armed guards, talking to the bugs like huge dogs and telling them that they're to be evicted. If they ask questions, he shouts at them. Then he's resolutely friendly to the camera, you know, "all in a day's work, ha ha, mongrel scum." It's an effective device that succeeds in making you hope someone breaks his dorkfuck nose. In keeping with the theme of abrupt tonal shifts, we're supposed to feel bad for this effortless dweeb when the eventual tragedy strikes because he's got a wife and family back home, even as he's spent the first 20 minutes of the film being a complete sack of shit to these doofy bugs who've landed here.
He finds one of these slum-bugmen, who's a bit smarter than his brethren (who're content to bound around eating tires and cat food) and who has a plan to leave on the big ship in order to go home. The ship's been hovering over the slums of South Africa for the better part of 8 years, and you'd think the bugmen would want to go home. It's difficult to tell, really. As I've said, they spend most of their time clicking and bouncing around, and when they stop to do anything else, they're set upon by gangs, beat up or shot at. You'd think life on their own world was a lot like this, if they seem as content to do this as anything else. Most of them, anyway.
The smart one's squirreled away a precious few milligrams of a reddish fluid, which he claims to a partner (and his adorable son) is the key to reactivating the ship and heading them off back to their homeworld. So, the story now is "the reason the aliens are still here is because only one of them has the keys to the ship." Huh. Apparently, the red fluid which is so vital to their survival is in scant supply, but all of their technology also runs on it, and most of that's been confiscated by the government. So he's been collecting drops of it all this time, hoping to accrue enough to go home.
But then along comes Vikers, who confiscates the vial containing the fluid and continues being a jackass. Until! He becomes exposed to a bit of the red stuff and begins to feel genuinely horrible. At a party his family is throwing for him as the result of some promotion he's received for being the best jerkface alien landlord, the movie decides that suddenly creepy horror would work best. I don't know how often it's been done in movies, but watching tiny bits of oneself fall off with casual, leprous ease is at the head of the pack of things that genuinely creep me right the fuck out. The movie gets points for that.
Vikers suddenly realizes that he's mutating as a result of his contact with the fluid, and is admitted to an emergency room. The military immediately begins using him as a means of testing alien weapons, as their live DNA is the only means of operating it. By this time, he has one whole alien arm, panics and manages an escape. His goal now is to dodge the organization he used to work for long enough to find the smart bug who he confiscated the vial from. He does so, after a few more shock horror moments, and learns that the changes are essentially permanent, unless the smart bug can get back to his home. Thus begins the uneasy truce between a genuinely smart and sympathetic character, and Vikers.
If you think I might be being a bit too hard on the flappy-faced ponce, he single-handedly and very selfishly just about ruins everything the movie works toward, only to attempt back-handed redemption when he suddenly realizes what a tool he's been and that he's helped eradicate every other even slightly feasible option.
Which leads to a capture by a very uneasily-handled Nigerian gang, who want to eat the smart alien to gain his body's powers. At which point the clunky handling becomes a nightmarish heave into We Don't Know What We're Doing. "Well," go Blomkamp and Jackson. "We kind of messed up all our race-relation metaphors and had a hard time getting whatever message we had across. Now that the leering black cannibals are here, what say we forgo any kind of ambiguity and give the main character a gun-stuffed robot suit with which to go snooker-loopy?" It works as a sort of climax, but if you're going to head me off and assume it's going to help me sympathize with the main by appearing to martyr him...guess what? You lose. He, because of short-sightedness and desire to prove he's the smelly tosser he was at the beginning of the film, ruined it all himself. He could have done any number of things to save himself, rather than entrench himself further and needlessly endanger the only being in Creation who dared even attempt to help him even after he mistreated selfsame creature (and his son!) not more than an hour beforehand for career advancement. So, you know, chomp on a cock, Vikers. It's more than what you deserve.
I was made tense during a number of moments in the film, which counts for something. By no means was it any fun. I imagine most racial profiling documentaries aren't really supposed to be, though. But the metaphors, to me, were mixed and mishandled. What we're supposed to be walking out of it feeling, aside from thankful all of our own blood is still in our own body, is confused and not exactly clear. The robot suit fight and subsequent explosion scene seemed a bit out of place; I imagine that Blomkamp was a bit peeved that his first actual feature film, his adaptation of the most overrated FPS series ever realized, Halo, fell through the grate, so he needed his guns-and-Go-Bots fix thrown in someplace. I also blame that as justification for the one guy on the goverment's side who's so cartoonishly evil I couldn't help but laugh at him. A mean white guy with blonde hair who twitches convulsively and shoots and kills things because he likes to shoot and kill things. Someone easy to root against, one assumes, someone literally living a no-moral lifestyle so we know for sure who Vikers is defecting from, making it easy to say to ourselves, "Well, they let that guy work for them, and he's obviously kill-crazy. Go Vikers!" Again, it doesn't quite work, because he's a cartoon villain. I usually root for the cartoons when they're fighting the real-life people. Except in Cool World. I wanted everyone to die in that.
I propose that a morally grey character would have helped things along immensely...someone who saw the plight of the bugmen and sympathized, but saw his cherished humanity's best interests at heart, and strove for more than a simple and unusual accord of slumming and accessing hitherto unknown military weapons and protocols. Someone who could attempt to officiate an understanding between the two races, perhaps dying at some crucial point to show just how vitally necessary understanding really is in situations like these. It would have made a completely different story, but I believe that it would have made an altogether better one, too. Sure, it wouldn't have been one lone man's perspective on this, and yes, sometimes our protagonists aren't the nicest people in the world, but that doesn't mean they get to cock things up every time the chips are down, and I'm not going to feel bad for them when they do. Live a selfish oblivious twat-monkey, die a selfish oblivious twat-monkey.
I don't get the average reviewer's massive hard-on for this film, so I'm going to chalk it up to it being above-average sci-fi, which is admittedly pretty rare. I prefer my sci-fi taking a sharp left at 4th and Bananas, not so much full of grittiness and real-life parallels and racial messages. I guess that's why I never liked Alien Nation, even though I'll admit readily that that was better handled than this film.
Overall, I say pass. Your blood-n-guts are better found elsewhere, as are your race-relations, your shooting, your giant critters and your robots.
It's rare that I cannot find cause to revisit a film, but I honestly can't think of another reason to watch this one.
As usual, that's just me.
Current Music: Kraftwerk ~ "The Robots"
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