Sometimes great things can come from failure. After the success of the Lord of the Rings films, Peter Jackson set his sights on adapting the Halo videogame series to the big screen with an unknown director by the name of Neill Blomkamp at the helm. After a few years in development hell, the project officially fell apart. Jackson, however, was determined to let the world see what this Blomkamp fellow was capable of. Given a relatively minor budget of $30 million (compared to the intended $185 million for the Halo adaptation and the usual $150-200 million for your typical sci-fi flick these days), Blomkamp put together District 9 in his native South Africa.
By now, you know the story. A private Military contracting company is tasked with relocating a slum full of aliens who were abandoned on earth when their mothership parked over metropolitan Johannesburg. A low-level bureaucrat (played by first-timer Sharlto Copley) finds himself in the heat of the action. Beyond that, it’s better for you to see it unfold for yourself.
District 9 plays out like a distillation of the best sci-fi elements into a complex and ambitious story. The characters are painted in shades of gray, and it explores some heavy philosophical and political subtexts (inescapable when you set a film in South Africa, it seems), and boasts one of the best performances by a non-actor that I can remember. And most importantly, it looks a lot like Blomkamp really genuinely wanted to tell this story and make this film. Creativity flourishes under limitation, and having a modest budget seems to have paid off in a stronger focus on characters and story than gee-whiz special effects (though District 9 boasts some very impressive effects) and bombastic action scenes. As a result, it’s incredibly difficult to not get emotionally invested in the (still pretty bombastic) action scenes that follow. It just makes for more effective storytelling. Using an inexperienced actor as a character who is wholly out of his depth aids in this immensely, and frankly couldn’t be faked. It also helps that Copley is said to have improvised all of his dialogue, which if true, means that Copley is an impressive talent to keep an eye on over the next few years.
It’s still a flawed film. There’s some old action/sci-fi movie tropes that stick out; the sadistic villain earns a particularly messy end (we’ve seen this countless times before), the final act plays out like the vast majority of action movies always do, and while some of the film’s gore is presented as squirm-inducingly realistic, other elements of it look fairly unrealistic and cartoonish in comparison. To the credit of all involved, however, I couldn’t find any fault in the technical areas of the film; it was shot exclusively on digital video for a small sum, but it looks fantastic. And any creative or conceptual flaws can be overlooked by the steady execution of probably the best sci-fi film to come along in far too long.
A-