District 9

A disabled space ship breaks down over Johannesburg, South Africa, filled with malnourished insectoid aliens. With no way of leaving the planet, the authorities set up refugee camps in the shantytown section of Joburg, where alien-human conflicts emerge almost instantly. The set up seems like a feature-length Twilight Zone episode; sci fi allegory ripe for the transmission of liberal pieties about the evil of apartheid and xenophobia. The pleasant surprise of District 9 is that the social critique is much more cutting and relevant than self-evident pap about how "aliens are people too!" Instead, District 9 writer-director Neil Blomkamp offers a harrowing examination of the fate of surplus populations in an era of post-industrial capitalism.

As District 9 opens, the alien refugees have been living in confined squalor for twenty years, in the shadow of their hovering, immobile spaceship, and conflict with the humans of the city has reached a fever pitch. A corporation has been contracted by the government to evict the aliens from their camp to be relocated to a new facility hundreds of miles from human populations. The human protagonist is a schmucky middle manager charged with overseeing the evictions played by Sharlto Copley. His character, Wikus Van Der Merwe, is an affable dope, happy to carry out management's directives in order to advance his career. That directive: corral the aliens into a desolate wasteland, while at the same time scouring District 9 for alien weapons technology that could be reverse engineered for human use. The scenes of Copley and his machine-gun-toting mercenary comrades conning aliens into signing off on their eviction aren't there to remind the viewer of the horrors of apartheid or anti-immigrant sentiment. They remind the viewer of similar scenes from slum-areas the world over. The aliens, derisively nicknamed "prawns," could be the slumdwellers of Rio or Manila or Mumbai or the real Johannesburg. They're exploited and herded not on the basis of their alien-ness, but due to their utter uselessness to the economic order. The modern world economy is good at creating two things: powerful corporations with transnational power, like the film's fictional Multi-National United, and surplus population. Cities the world over are surrounded by ad hoc communities of people without employment or even the possibility of future employment. The post-industrial order simply has no use for them, except perhaps as organ donors for sickly members of the 'productive' class. One of the preeminent functions of the modern state (and, to an increasing degree, private enterprises like Halliburton and Blackwater) is the management of these populations; keeping them and their squalor and their potential criminality as far away from the centers of commerce and residence and tourism of the world's cities as possible. District 9 puts this phenomenon, and its implications for the future of human rights in an increasingly privatized, profit-driven world, into a startlingly relief, with insights made palatable to a mass audience by the sensational vision of refugee aliens and a light touch with the message-stick.

The first third or so of District 9 is presented as a straight-up documentary, with footage of Copley evicting the prawns from the district interspersed with talking head testimonials from scholars and government officials. The device works like gangbusters, injecting some nice foreshadowing as well as offering straight-up expository dialogue with considerably less awkwardness than is usually found in science fiction films. The hand-held camerawork inside District 9 will probably nauseate the people who tend to complain about the Bourne movies, but it grounds the action in reality, making it instantly easy to suspend disbelief as you watch giant bug-looking aliens get hassled by bureaucrats. During the first act, Blomkamp and company are content to soak up the atmosphere created by the top-notch special effects, letting the parallel with the heavily-policed, frequently bulldozed ghettos of the world speak for itself. The film takes a turn when Copley is exposed to a mysterious alien fluid in one of the shanties which begins warping his DNA and transforming him into one of a prawn. Not only does the political allegory take a back seat to hitting a series of familiar action film plot points, but the documentary conceit is rejected in favor of traditional third-person camera setups. At this point, District 9 morphs along with Copley, from a Star Trek-like ethical rumination to a Star Wars-esque slam-bang action flick. But even as the shootouts and chase scenes rev up, there is still the striking imagery of the human Copley, initially cool but clearly somewhat disgusted by the poverty and filth of the aliens' lives, is slowly immersed into the District, with the audience sharing Copley's journey to identification with the prawns' plight. Not to mention the fact that the second-half descent into action film cliche also features genuinely entertaining, well-staged action scenes that are boosted immeasurably by the liberal use of the alien's weaponry. A shootout is one thing, a shootout with laser rifles that blow people up like hot dogs in a microwave is another, infinitely more awesome, thing altogether. The last third of the film has its faults, from the familiar action elements to some interaction between the main character and one of the aliens that feel inauthentic and forced, as if in an attempt to shoehorn an emotional climax. But none of these issues detract from the ingenuity of the premise, the vitality of the social insight, the thrifty-but-impressive special effects, or the whiz-bang coolness of the action scenes. All of these elements combine to make District 9 the best action movie of the summer. With a 30 million dollar budget, District 9 shows why the long-promised "death of the blockbuster," if it ever actually happens, will be nothing worth mourning.