If you were one of the 37 million who caught the much-anticipated Sci-fi flick District 9 over the weekend, you either loved it or hated it. There is no in between.
I count myself among the movie goers who hated it. I was not impressed at all. In fact, I thought the film was garbage considering the hype leading up to the movie’s opening.
I expected more from producer Peter Jackson (The Lord Of The Rings, King Kong). But District 9 was a failed takeoff on Independence Day, The Predator and The Fly all rolled into one. The Fly was a better movie, in my opinion.
District 9‘s special effects were decent, the blood and gore was prolific (brain matter splattered on the screen every 15 minutes), and the jerky camera work was nauseating.
District 9 was filmed documentary style with agents from international government agencies providing history on an extraterrestrial race that found it’s way into Johannesburg airspace 20 years ago.
After months without any contact from the beings inside the spaceship, the military cut through the hull only to find the ship overcrowded with sickly, alien “workers” that look like giant cockroaches wearing predator suits. The aliens are rounded up and forced to live in slum-like conditions in a government-run settlement in Johannesburg called District 9, while the spaceship they rode in on hovers over Johannesburg like a junked clunker for 20 years.
District 9 is named after an area in New Orleans that was hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. It’s supposed to be an allegory for the apartheid-like treatment of Katrina victims who were uprooted from their homes, but that message is lost amidst the illogical storyline and racial cliches.
The South Africans are stereotypically cast as thugs, gang members, predators and scammers in a culture so steeped in voodoo that they believe eating the aliens (now called “prawns”) will bring them super powers. The natives take advantage of the prawns by scamming them into trading their biological weapons for cat food (the prawns’ favorite snack). The only problem is the guns don’t work unless alien DNA is detected on the trigger.
The prawns breed amongst themselves and with human females (species interbreeding) and before you know it, there are over 1.8 million of the buggers overrunning District 9. So the decision is made to evict the prawns from their Johannesburg slum to a District 10 tent settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
The eviction process is a massive undertaking involving a small multi-national agency (MNU) and complicated by the fact that, after 20 years, the aliens still haven’t learned to speak English. But oddly enough, the humans have all learned to communicate with the prawns by deciphering their strange clicking language (go figure).
During the eviction process, a French field agent named Wikus van der Merwe is contaminated when a canister of biological jet fuel (that was 20 years in the making) accidentally sprays in his face. Wikus slowly begins the transformation from man to prawn reminiscent of Jeff goldblum’s metamorphosis into The Fly in the 1986 horror classic.
Wikus is hunted down by the MNU and South African gangs who seek to harvest his body parts (and DNA) once they realize his part-prawn DNA can operate the alien weaponry. Wikus finds an ally in Christopher, seemingly the only intelligent prawn in District 9, who flew the massive alien ship to earth and now wants to fly it back home with his son.
Christopher promises to “fix” Wikus by making him human again (when he returns to earth in 3 years), and the two embark on a suicide mission to MNU headquarters to retrieve the biological jet fuel.
As I noted before, what is missing from this film is any semblance of logic. For instance, how does inhaling biological jet fuel make Wikus transform from man to prawn? If it takes Christopher 3 years to come back and “fix” Wikus, and it took 20 years to make the biological jet fuel, how many years did it take the aliens to build that massive spacecraft in the first place?
Instead of the prawns trading their biological weapons for cat food, why didn’t they use the weapons to blast their way out of District 9? How was Christopher able to hide his hovercraft underneath his shack in the slums with the entire world watching on CNN?
If you’re planning on going to see District 9, leave all logical reasoning at the door. Or rent The Fly and watch that instead.
