District 9 (2009)
There were several movies I was genuinely excited for this summer. Star Trek; Terminator: Salvation; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; and District 9 were the biggest ones.
Star Trek was flawed, but it met my expectations well. Terminator: Salvation pretty much had no reason to exist, but it was a fun waste of time. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was better than I was expecting, but ultimately was missing something.
So that brings us to District 9. From the trailers, it was clearly a sort of a riff on Alien Nation, but for once the oppressed aliens didn't look just like us--a trope I'm as sick of as any true sci-fi fan should be--but instead looked like some unholy combination of Cthulhu and a katydid. Or, as the film calls them in a clever dig at the tendency of oppressors to denegrate the oppressed by comparing them to a "lower" life form: "Prawns".
Also, the trailers featured a giant alien robot wrecking shit. How could I not love that? So, yeah, I was psyched to see this...and then, for a variety of reasons, I had to put off seeing it for a week. In that week, I heard tons of rave reviews--and more than a few negative reviews rife with charges of racism--so I was even more psyched.
Turns out a week can make a big difference. I left the theater, I confess, feeling disappointed. I wanted to like the film, and indeed, there are parts that I liked--but it never made the connection I was hoping for.
Part of the problem is, unfortunately, the film's "hero". Wilker, the MNU Agent who becomes infected with alien DNA, is acted beautifully. There's also something very realistic about him. At first he's a racist asshole--though a decent guy in other respoects--who sees the mistreatment of the aliens as just part of his job. He doesn't see anything wrong with forcing the Prawns to sign eviction notices, when half of them don't even understand what "eviction" is.
There's a particularly chilling moment when he and his group discover an unauthorized nest of Prawn eggs and torch it with flamethrowers. Wilker turns to the camera and laughingly talks about the "popping" sound made by the baby Prawns bursting in the flames reminding him of popcorn. Occasionally he'll express regret when the security forces get too rough with the Prawns, but he's still, in essence, a monster.
And then he uncovers a mysterious alien cylinder full of a mysterious liquid--and accidentally sprays himself in the face with it. In a matter of hours he's experiencing roughly the same troubles as Seth Brundle--his fingernails fall off, he vomits frequently, and finally his left arm transforms into a Prawn's claw. Now that MNU wants him as a biological weapon (since only alien DNA can operate the aliens' weapons), he becomes a fugitive forced to take refuge in District 9, where he begins to understand what Hell the Prawns have been put through.
The trouble is, as an audience identification figure, Wilker fails. He starts becoming a decent person after he begins living among the Prawns--but then he quickly becomes an unsympathetic, selfish wanker.
The most sympathetic characters in the film are two Prawns: "Christopher Johnson" and his adorable son. The cylinder belonged to Christopher, and is some kind of fuel that can reactivate the aliens' mothership. Christopher agrees to help Wilker, if Wilker will help him get the cylinder back. Wilker and Christopher's raid on MNU is a beautifully done sequence--but Wilker goes to hell shortly after.
Christopher Johnson, the film's true hero.
I won't go into spoiler territory, but essentially Wilker proceeds to screw Christopher over every chance he gets--and then he'll suddenly have a last-minute change of heart and try to help him out. This happens at least twice, and it's annoying as hell each time. There could have been a lot more realistic ways of injecting drama into the film.
In the end, this really hurt the film. I really wanted to like it, but the flaws in its story and characters really brought down my enjoyment.
A lot of love and hard work were clearly put into this film. It boasts a stated budget of $30 million, but it looks a lot better than, say, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra which boasts a $170 million budget--over five times larger! The Prawns are simply awe-inspiring in their realism. They behave like physical props, despite being CG creations. They have weight, mass--and they react to light and shadow as they should. Christopher's son is not always as convincing as the adult Prawns, but they never cease to look real.
I'm a bit less thrilled with their speech, however. A creature like that would no doubt communicate much like the creatures in this film, but their voices sound just like your average Star Wars alien. With so much effort expended on how they look and behave, I would have expected a bit more time devoted to what they would sound like.
Still, it's a shame the film didn't focus more on them instead of the humans. Considering how deeply I identified with Christopher and his son right off the bat, I really don't think I needed a comforting (white) human face to help me understand their kind.
As for the charges of racism, well, it depends on which charges you mean. Some charged that the film was an obvious Apartheid allegory (well, yeah), but that the word "Apartheid" is never mentioned once. This seems an odd complaint to me. Perhaps that reviewer has never seen the original mini-series V to know just how awkward it is when you make your allegory so obvious and then insult the audience by assuming they're too dumb to "get it".
Others charge that the aliens are racist because "they look like cockroaches" and because they're violent, destructive monsters that feed on disgusting garbage--they argue that the point would have been much more effective if the aliens were gentle, peaceful creatures beinf mistreated. I agree that the early trailers made it seem like that was going to be the case, but I do not agree that the portrayal of the aliens in the film is racist at all. In fact, it's near perfect. It's a bit exaggerated, sure, but how do you think oppressors justify their oppression? They play up the evils of the people they are oppressing, even if it's only a small fraction of that population--and even if those evils are only perpetrated by that small fraction because of the oppression.
And as for complaining because they look like arthropods? (They look nothing like cockroaches, I'm sorry but that part of the argument is invalid) Again, I think that's missing the point.
However, the claims of racism because of the portrayal of the Nigerian gangsters who've set up shop in District 9? Yeah, that was pretty fucking racist, I admit. I don't know if it was intentional or not, honestly, but I won't argue that it was anything but what it was.
In the end, I fet like there was just a lt of missed opportunity in District 9. I can't say I disliked it, exactly, but I didn't like, either. I hope it does well enough at the box office to encourage studios to continue releasing intelligent sci-fi like it, however. It was a bit of a misfire for me, but I'm still glad I was given the chance to see it at all.