District 9 to Top 2009?
Posted on | September 7, 2009 | No Comments
There is no doubt: District 9 will be on most film critics’ lists of the top 10 best movies of 2009.
But will it be at the top of the top? I don’t think so — most sci-fi movies are never seen in the same class as tear-jerking dramas or period-piece epics. But it certainly deserves all of the critical acclaim and box-office receipts ($103 million to date in the U.S. alone) it’s received so far.
If you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it, District 9 is a “hugantically” unique and amazingly realistic take on the aliens-landing-on-Earth genre. In it, a huge mothership arrives and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa. For 28 years. Nothing comes out. No one goes in. It just floats there, above the city … for nearly three decades.
Then, the government decides it has waited long enough for our visitors to show themselves, so they send in a crew to break into the spaceship. Inside, they don’t find big-eyed bald-headed aliens with massive death rays or slimy creatures ready to take over the world. Instead, they find malnourished drone aliens who have been left to their own devices after their leaders mysteriously die off.
So, the MNU (Multi-National United, a sort of corporate take on the United Nations) set up temporary housing for the aliens in the ghettos of Johannesburg. Soon enough, this area becomes even worse than the worst of the city’s slums, rampant with crime and pollution, as the creatures (known pejoratively as “prawns”) multiple in the millions. The locals become disenchanted with their trash-eating, resource-consuming non-human neighbors, and eventually segregation is the only solution.
MNU’s long-term answer to the non-human infestation is to round up all the aliens in District 9 and move them to a “bigger and better” area outside of J’burg away from humans.
The man in charge of this operation is Wikus (pronounced “Vickers”), a highly intelligent but bumbling bureaucrat. But when he accidentally exposes himself to their biotechnology, Wikus might very well become the one who frees them from their terrestrial oppression. And so begins his heroic story arc, which doesn’t quite end the way Hollywood’s screenwriting conventions would have you believe.
It starts off methodically — slow, some would say — with a documentary style. But then it begins to pick up the pace in the second act until the movie’s moving at such a clip that it’s a full-out action movie.
That’s largely because this beautifully-crafted script — by director Neill Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell — is not only groundbreaking in its combination of heady human themes like apartheid with genre elements such as invading aliens, it’s also an intentional “F*ck You” to Microsoft and the Hollywood studio system.
You see, Oscar-winner Peter Jackson (of The Lord of the Rings fame) had been hired on to produce the movie adaptation of the ginormous hit video game Halo, which was produced by Microsoft and Bungie. Jackson handpicked commercial director Blomkamp to helm the project.
Blomkamp, born and raised in J’burg and a graduate of the Vancouver Film School in Canada, made his mark as a 3-D animator and as a director for several smart commercials. But Microsoft and the studios funding the project bristled at the thought of a then-26-year-old directing their flagship project. Blomkamp even made a series of brilliant Halo short movies to prove what he could do.
Still, the “brilliant” folks in charge of the movie balked, and the project stalled. So Jackson and Blomkamp decided to buck the studio system and just create a movie they wanted to see themselves, outside of executive committees tampering with their creative juices. The result — District 9, a $30-million independent film from South Africa that has since gone on to gross more than triple its budget and no doubt put a little bit of egg on the face of Microsoft and the studios involved with that Halo project.
With a we-don’t-need-’em attitude, a brilliant script, and solid CGI, District 9 is easily one of the best films of the year.
Tags: aliens > District 9 > Halo > Lord of the Rings > Microsoft > Neill Blomkamp > Peter Jackson