district 9 review
Weeks ago, we made plans with friends to see District 9. Since then, I'd heard some stuff about racism in the movie which turned me off from wanting to see it, but since we'd already made the plans, I figured I'd see for myself.
I didn't think it failed in all the ways I'd heard it did. But it did fail. And it failed in a big enough way that I could never really get immersed in the movie.
It has a few good points. The story seems to aim for a Children of Men vibe, a downbeat near-dystopian vision; it mostly gets the mood right, and it benefits from having an extremely flawed protagonist. The action is shot well.
The special effects are stupendous, not because they're flashy, but because the aliens are just there. I never doubted the physical presence of the aliens, though with their mobile mouth-tentacles and double limbs, they're obviously CG. Considering the relatively small budget of District 9, this is a pretty amazing feat.
But it's also an extremely flawed movie. The film is about an alien race who are stranded on Earth. Their ship hovers inert over Johannesburg. The aliens, evacuated from the dead ship, have all been cordoned into District 9, a shantytown adjacent to the city.
The big fail of the film is a subplot involving a group of Nigerian warlords who've set up camp in District 9 and exploit the alien refugees. Take basically any stereotype ever perpetrated about savage Africans and add machine guns, and you have the characterization of the Nigerians of District 9. They aren't the only villains in the movie, and all the villains are dialed up to 11. But the characterization of the Nigerians is just... really faily and unnecessary.
On the other hand, some people saw "what we need is a white guy" tropes in District 9's main plot, and I really didn't see that. The film centers on a white guy, but he screws things up repeatedly, and at the end, nothing really positive comes from him. Nobody needed this white guy.
I'll go into more detail after some spoiler space.
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The main plot follows a hapless white guy named Wikus. He's the son-in-law of a honcho of a(n evil, natch) corporation uncreatively named Multi-National United, and his dad-in-law puts him in charge of notifying alien refugees from District 9 that they're being relocated to the newly created District 10, a heavily barricaded tent city several miles away from Johannesburg.
Wikus again and again shows that he's just as xenophobic and horrible as any of the MNU characters; the only difference is that Wikus is scared and weak, and so he hides his xenophobia behind a tissue-thin veneer of nervous, jolly condescension. While poking through an alien's belongings, crowing about finding weapons (though there are none) Wikus discovers a silver canister that sprays him with Plot Device Juice.
The juice was collected painstakingly over twenty years by an alien called Christopher Johnson and his young son. Apparently, it's some kind of biological catalyst that the aliens' technology uses for fuel. But somehow, after the juice hits Wikus in the face, he begins to transform into an alien. Wikus tries to hide what happened, bagging the canister of juice and duly turning it over to MNU.
Eventually Wikus himself is also confiscated by MNU, and Wikus sees an MNU lab full of aliens subjected to medical experiments because the aliens' weapons and technology can't be used by human beings, only by the aliens. (I guess they have the ATA gene?)
MNU has been trying for years to get the alien tech to work for them. They force Wikus to involuntarily test one alien gun after another in a harrowing sequence, and find that he's able to activate them; his mutation makes him invaluable. MNU are, of course, quick to decide to dissect him (though it's far from clear why they think he's more useful dead than alive.)
Anyway, Wikus escapes into District 9, and bumbles his way to Christopher again. Christopher explains that they need the canister of juice to power a small spacecraft that Christopher's been hiding away and reunite it with the main ship overhead so that the juice can reactivate the whole shebang. Christopher promises that if Wikus helps him, Christopher will use the technology aboard the main ship to reverse Wikus' mutation.
Meanwhile, the subplot involving the Nigerian gang in District 9 shows their (wheelchair-bound, for bonus disability fail) leader collecting alien weaponry and ordering aliens killed so that he can eat bits of them in hopes of absorbing their ability to use the technology. When Wikus attempts to get weaponry from the Nigerians to use to recover the juice, their leader orders Wikus' alien arm cut off so that the leader can eat it and absorb his power.
After seeing the movie, I voiced my disgust with this subplot. My friends pointed out that they'd read news stories about warlords in the region behaving in extravagantly awful ways, and about superstitious people believing in witchcraft, and so on. My answer was: so what? This movie isn't a documentary: the filmmakers chose to depict these characters as brutal booga-booga witch doctors and thugs. They may not have made every single element up out of whole cloth, but they didn't have to use any of those stories. Nobody made the creators put the Nigerian gang in as a subplot. They decided to depict that.
Yes, there are white bad guys too, and they're just as superstitious in their laboratory-bound way-- they also want to kill Wikus to gain his power, by dissection instead of ingestion. But the movie doesn't draw that parallel clearly. It just uses grotesque stereotyped images of Nigerian guys as violent borderline-cannibals in a lazy ploy to create fear and tension.
Back to the plot. Wikus and Christopher recover the juice and the film moves into its last act, with both MNU and the Nigerians attempting to recover Wikus.
But the biggest obstacle to Wikus and Christopher's plan is Wikus himself. Christopher admits that healing Wikus will take years, because Christopher needs the juice to get help for his people. Wikus then idiotically turns on Christopher, takes the juice, gets into the hidden spacecraft and tries to fly it up to the main ship... and gets shot down.
Action action action, etc. The MNU and the Nigerians clash, the Nigerians get Wikus, Wikus strikes back against them and gets access to their alien arsenal. Wikus gets a fully armored alien mech under his control. He has a chance to rescue Christopher, who's been getting the shit beat out of him in the meantime-- and even fully armored, Wikus runs away. Only when he hears the mercenaries say that they're going to kill Christopher-- the only person Wikus has met who has given Wikus any hope of reversing his mutation-- does Wikus turn around and fight them off.
So Wikus saves Christopher's life, but only when fully armored and for selfish reasons. He helps Christopher get to the spacecraft and Christopher reunites it with the main ship, taking control of the entire enormous ship and moving it for the first time in years, setting a course for the aliens' homeworld.
Meanwhile, by the end of the final fight, Wikus seems to be finally acting out of altruism, maybe, but it's questionable. He urges Christopher to go on without him and for about ten seconds, he talks a pretty good self-sacrificing game. But the moment the armored suit fails and Wikus spills out of it, he's right back to crawling away and begging for mercy from the corporate mercenary leader (who's disposed of by an alien ex machina.)
In the end, Christopher and his son escape, the rest of the aliens are relocated to the tent city of District 10, and no one knows for sure what happened to Wikus. In the last shots, we see an alien who appears to be Wikus, fully transformed, living in the tents of District 10, which he helped MNU create and implement when he was human.
So, the fail. The Nigerian gang subplot is loathsome. There's nothing else to really say about that.
On the other hand, I just don't see "it took a white man to set them free" in this plot. Wikus doesn't save anyone. He's an obstacle. He makes things worse at every turn. Wikus takes the canister of juice from Christopher in the first place; if it weren't for Wikus, Christopher would have been able to unite the spacecraft with the main ship before anyone knew what was happening. And with the power Wikus wasted when he tried to fly the craft himself, Christopher might have been able to rescue the other aliens, rather than just escaping to get help.
Even after helping recover the juice-- for his own selfish reasons-- Wikus is still a xenophobic moron who turns on Christopher and steals the juice and the spacecraft, and promptly gets the spacecraft wrecked.
Wikus doesn't teach anyone tolerance. He doesn't help anyone communicate. No one really seems to know better by the end of the movie. The aliens are still segregated. Most people still hate and fear them. No one knows exactly what happened. There seems to be significant fear that Christopher is going to return with an alien invasion force.
One of the few sympathetic characters, in the end, turns out to be a Black man who appears sporadically acting in aid of Wikus and MNU throughout the first act, Fundiswa Mhlanga. In the denouement it's revealed that Mhlanga is in prison because he exposed MNU's genetic experimentation, weapons research, and attempts on Wikus' life to the world-- but a coverup is in effect.
At the end of the movie, the only improvement as a result of the events of the film is that Christopher and his son escaped with the ship, and that is entirely due to Christopher's efforts. All Wikus really does through his actions in the film is undo the damage he did when he stole the juice canister from Christopher in the first place.
On a storytelling level, District 9 becomes pretty unsatisfying once you give it a little thought. The only alien technology shown besides the main ship and the smaller spacecraft is weaponry. (Oh, and one hologram generator thing that Christopher's son repairs.) There appear to have been no technological advances as a result of learning from the alien tech. Even if humans can't operate the tech, they could convince or force the aliens to operate it and learn from that. Hell, just knowing those capabilities are possible should have opened up some breakthroughs in our own science.
Most ridiculously, the main ship appears to be completely unoccupied when Christopher takes it over. No one is up there studying it? Likewise, no social scientists appear to be trying to communicate with the alien to study their culture or learn from them. Wikus and a few other human characters are shown to understand the aliens' language, and most of the depicted aliens understand English. Yet there's so little understanding between the aliens and humans, it's as though they've never spoken to each other.
Possibly this is because, other than Christopher and his son, few of the aliens seem particularly intelligent. The aliens are very unevenly portrayed. Christopher seems intelligent, and he has at least one accomplice who's somewhat smart. But some aliens seem to be very dull-witted, and others behave like animals rather than sentient beings. For example, when the armed MNU convoy first rolls into District 9, an alien approaches the armed phalanx and tries to eat a tire. Wikus explains that tires taste good to them, but it's got to be a pretty dumb alien to ignore the NUMEROUS guys with guns in favor of chomping on their tire. (Iirc, they shoot that alien.)
The story benefits from making Wikus such a flawed lameass of a character. He's not remotely heroic. He's just a guy who has things happen to him, and he's really unprepared, and terrible at coping. However, since Wikus isn't all that sympathetic in his own right, the filmmakers seem to have compensated by making the villains completely cardboard evilevilEVIL baddies. It's not just the cartoon stereotyped Nigerian guys. The leader of the MNU mercenaries acts psycho and says that he loves to kill aliens at the least excuse. MNU scientists torture Wikus while experimenting on his mutating body and unhesitatingly recommend cutting him up: they cite the possibility of finally being able to use alien weapons, and selling alien technology for trillions of dollars. Wikus' own father-in-law coldly orders his execution. The villainy is dialed up to 11, with no one showing any hesitation or worry about committing these evil acts.
If District 9 is supposed to work primarily as an allegory about apartheid, racism and xenophobia, it fails, because its Nigerian gang subplot makes a mockery of any anti-racism message they could possibly be trying for. On the other hand, if District 9 is supposed to work on a literal, realistic level... it doesn't really do that well either. There's almost no sense of a larger world outside Johannesburg, and a lot of the humans' ignorance about the aliens makes no sense.
So near and yet so far from being good. I can't really recommend District 9. There are good things about it, but it has Problems with a capital P.
I didn't think it failed in all the ways I'd heard it did. But it did fail. And it failed in a big enough way that I could never really get immersed in the movie.
It has a few good points. The story seems to aim for a Children of Men vibe, a downbeat near-dystopian vision; it mostly gets the mood right, and it benefits from having an extremely flawed protagonist. The action is shot well.
The special effects are stupendous, not because they're flashy, but because the aliens are just there. I never doubted the physical presence of the aliens, though with their mobile mouth-tentacles and double limbs, they're obviously CG. Considering the relatively small budget of District 9, this is a pretty amazing feat.
But it's also an extremely flawed movie. The film is about an alien race who are stranded on Earth. Their ship hovers inert over Johannesburg. The aliens, evacuated from the dead ship, have all been cordoned into District 9, a shantytown adjacent to the city.
The big fail of the film is a subplot involving a group of Nigerian warlords who've set up camp in District 9 and exploit the alien refugees. Take basically any stereotype ever perpetrated about savage Africans and add machine guns, and you have the characterization of the Nigerians of District 9. They aren't the only villains in the movie, and all the villains are dialed up to 11. But the characterization of the Nigerians is just... really faily and unnecessary.
On the other hand, some people saw "what we need is a white guy" tropes in District 9's main plot, and I really didn't see that. The film centers on a white guy, but he screws things up repeatedly, and at the end, nothing really positive comes from him. Nobody needed this white guy.
I'll go into more detail after some spoiler space.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The main plot follows a hapless white guy named Wikus. He's the son-in-law of a honcho of a(n evil, natch) corporation uncreatively named Multi-National United, and his dad-in-law puts him in charge of notifying alien refugees from District 9 that they're being relocated to the newly created District 10, a heavily barricaded tent city several miles away from Johannesburg.
Wikus again and again shows that he's just as xenophobic and horrible as any of the MNU characters; the only difference is that Wikus is scared and weak, and so he hides his xenophobia behind a tissue-thin veneer of nervous, jolly condescension. While poking through an alien's belongings, crowing about finding weapons (though there are none) Wikus discovers a silver canister that sprays him with Plot Device Juice.
The juice was collected painstakingly over twenty years by an alien called Christopher Johnson and his young son. Apparently, it's some kind of biological catalyst that the aliens' technology uses for fuel. But somehow, after the juice hits Wikus in the face, he begins to transform into an alien. Wikus tries to hide what happened, bagging the canister of juice and duly turning it over to MNU.
Eventually Wikus himself is also confiscated by MNU, and Wikus sees an MNU lab full of aliens subjected to medical experiments because the aliens' weapons and technology can't be used by human beings, only by the aliens. (I guess they have the ATA gene?)
MNU has been trying for years to get the alien tech to work for them. They force Wikus to involuntarily test one alien gun after another in a harrowing sequence, and find that he's able to activate them; his mutation makes him invaluable. MNU are, of course, quick to decide to dissect him (though it's far from clear why they think he's more useful dead than alive.)
Anyway, Wikus escapes into District 9, and bumbles his way to Christopher again. Christopher explains that they need the canister of juice to power a small spacecraft that Christopher's been hiding away and reunite it with the main ship overhead so that the juice can reactivate the whole shebang. Christopher promises that if Wikus helps him, Christopher will use the technology aboard the main ship to reverse Wikus' mutation.
Meanwhile, the subplot involving the Nigerian gang in District 9 shows their (wheelchair-bound, for bonus disability fail) leader collecting alien weaponry and ordering aliens killed so that he can eat bits of them in hopes of absorbing their ability to use the technology. When Wikus attempts to get weaponry from the Nigerians to use to recover the juice, their leader orders Wikus' alien arm cut off so that the leader can eat it and absorb his power.
After seeing the movie, I voiced my disgust with this subplot. My friends pointed out that they'd read news stories about warlords in the region behaving in extravagantly awful ways, and about superstitious people believing in witchcraft, and so on. My answer was: so what? This movie isn't a documentary: the filmmakers chose to depict these characters as brutal booga-booga witch doctors and thugs. They may not have made every single element up out of whole cloth, but they didn't have to use any of those stories. Nobody made the creators put the Nigerian gang in as a subplot. They decided to depict that.
Yes, there are white bad guys too, and they're just as superstitious in their laboratory-bound way-- they also want to kill Wikus to gain his power, by dissection instead of ingestion. But the movie doesn't draw that parallel clearly. It just uses grotesque stereotyped images of Nigerian guys as violent borderline-cannibals in a lazy ploy to create fear and tension.
Back to the plot. Wikus and Christopher recover the juice and the film moves into its last act, with both MNU and the Nigerians attempting to recover Wikus.
But the biggest obstacle to Wikus and Christopher's plan is Wikus himself. Christopher admits that healing Wikus will take years, because Christopher needs the juice to get help for his people. Wikus then idiotically turns on Christopher, takes the juice, gets into the hidden spacecraft and tries to fly it up to the main ship... and gets shot down.
Action action action, etc. The MNU and the Nigerians clash, the Nigerians get Wikus, Wikus strikes back against them and gets access to their alien arsenal. Wikus gets a fully armored alien mech under his control. He has a chance to rescue Christopher, who's been getting the shit beat out of him in the meantime-- and even fully armored, Wikus runs away. Only when he hears the mercenaries say that they're going to kill Christopher-- the only person Wikus has met who has given Wikus any hope of reversing his mutation-- does Wikus turn around and fight them off.
So Wikus saves Christopher's life, but only when fully armored and for selfish reasons. He helps Christopher get to the spacecraft and Christopher reunites it with the main ship, taking control of the entire enormous ship and moving it for the first time in years, setting a course for the aliens' homeworld.
Meanwhile, by the end of the final fight, Wikus seems to be finally acting out of altruism, maybe, but it's questionable. He urges Christopher to go on without him and for about ten seconds, he talks a pretty good self-sacrificing game. But the moment the armored suit fails and Wikus spills out of it, he's right back to crawling away and begging for mercy from the corporate mercenary leader (who's disposed of by an alien ex machina.)
In the end, Christopher and his son escape, the rest of the aliens are relocated to the tent city of District 10, and no one knows for sure what happened to Wikus. In the last shots, we see an alien who appears to be Wikus, fully transformed, living in the tents of District 10, which he helped MNU create and implement when he was human.
So, the fail. The Nigerian gang subplot is loathsome. There's nothing else to really say about that.
On the other hand, I just don't see "it took a white man to set them free" in this plot. Wikus doesn't save anyone. He's an obstacle. He makes things worse at every turn. Wikus takes the canister of juice from Christopher in the first place; if it weren't for Wikus, Christopher would have been able to unite the spacecraft with the main ship before anyone knew what was happening. And with the power Wikus wasted when he tried to fly the craft himself, Christopher might have been able to rescue the other aliens, rather than just escaping to get help.
Even after helping recover the juice-- for his own selfish reasons-- Wikus is still a xenophobic moron who turns on Christopher and steals the juice and the spacecraft, and promptly gets the spacecraft wrecked.
Wikus doesn't teach anyone tolerance. He doesn't help anyone communicate. No one really seems to know better by the end of the movie. The aliens are still segregated. Most people still hate and fear them. No one knows exactly what happened. There seems to be significant fear that Christopher is going to return with an alien invasion force.
One of the few sympathetic characters, in the end, turns out to be a Black man who appears sporadically acting in aid of Wikus and MNU throughout the first act, Fundiswa Mhlanga. In the denouement it's revealed that Mhlanga is in prison because he exposed MNU's genetic experimentation, weapons research, and attempts on Wikus' life to the world-- but a coverup is in effect.
At the end of the movie, the only improvement as a result of the events of the film is that Christopher and his son escaped with the ship, and that is entirely due to Christopher's efforts. All Wikus really does through his actions in the film is undo the damage he did when he stole the juice canister from Christopher in the first place.
On a storytelling level, District 9 becomes pretty unsatisfying once you give it a little thought. The only alien technology shown besides the main ship and the smaller spacecraft is weaponry. (Oh, and one hologram generator thing that Christopher's son repairs.) There appear to have been no technological advances as a result of learning from the alien tech. Even if humans can't operate the tech, they could convince or force the aliens to operate it and learn from that. Hell, just knowing those capabilities are possible should have opened up some breakthroughs in our own science.
Most ridiculously, the main ship appears to be completely unoccupied when Christopher takes it over. No one is up there studying it? Likewise, no social scientists appear to be trying to communicate with the alien to study their culture or learn from them. Wikus and a few other human characters are shown to understand the aliens' language, and most of the depicted aliens understand English. Yet there's so little understanding between the aliens and humans, it's as though they've never spoken to each other.
Possibly this is because, other than Christopher and his son, few of the aliens seem particularly intelligent. The aliens are very unevenly portrayed. Christopher seems intelligent, and he has at least one accomplice who's somewhat smart. But some aliens seem to be very dull-witted, and others behave like animals rather than sentient beings. For example, when the armed MNU convoy first rolls into District 9, an alien approaches the armed phalanx and tries to eat a tire. Wikus explains that tires taste good to them, but it's got to be a pretty dumb alien to ignore the NUMEROUS guys with guns in favor of chomping on their tire. (Iirc, they shoot that alien.)
The story benefits from making Wikus such a flawed lameass of a character. He's not remotely heroic. He's just a guy who has things happen to him, and he's really unprepared, and terrible at coping. However, since Wikus isn't all that sympathetic in his own right, the filmmakers seem to have compensated by making the villains completely cardboard evilevilEVIL baddies. It's not just the cartoon stereotyped Nigerian guys. The leader of the MNU mercenaries acts psycho and says that he loves to kill aliens at the least excuse. MNU scientists torture Wikus while experimenting on his mutating body and unhesitatingly recommend cutting him up: they cite the possibility of finally being able to use alien weapons, and selling alien technology for trillions of dollars. Wikus' own father-in-law coldly orders his execution. The villainy is dialed up to 11, with no one showing any hesitation or worry about committing these evil acts.
If District 9 is supposed to work primarily as an allegory about apartheid, racism and xenophobia, it fails, because its Nigerian gang subplot makes a mockery of any anti-racism message they could possibly be trying for. On the other hand, if District 9 is supposed to work on a literal, realistic level... it doesn't really do that well either. There's almost no sense of a larger world outside Johannesburg, and a lot of the humans' ignorance about the aliens makes no sense.
So near and yet so far from being good. I can't really recommend District 9. There are good things about it, but it has Problems with a capital P.