District 9.
Jones, Matthew
District 9 (2009)
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Distributed by TriStar Pictures
www.sonypictures.com
112 minutes
When, in 1982, a metropolis-sized alien spaceship took up residence
in the Earth's skies it did not hover above London or New York as
one might expect, but instead hung over Johannesburg, a city still in
the grip of apartheid. With their craft immobile and a strange disease
holding sway amongst the population, the anthropoid aliens were taken
pity on, welcomed to Earth and invited to live alongside the human
population. It was not long, however, before tensions with the locals
ignited and South Africa's new guests were forcibly relocated into
a shantytown slum populated by murderous gangs, cat food peddlers (the
equivalent of drug pushers for the aliens) and prostitutes. The
situation destabilised and by 2010 the creatures, now 1.8 million in
number, were again facing involuntary and violent relocation to a new
camp outside the city. When Wikus van de Merwe and a heavy military
force are sent in to serve eviction notices, the trouble really begins.
So begins District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by
The Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson. At its heart, this is a
science fiction blockbuster that has, alongside Watchmen, sought to
recover some respectability for the genre amid 2009's crop of
popcorn spectacles (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator:
Salvation and Gamer come to mind). Replete with obvious allusions to
South Africa's brutally segregated past, this is a film in which
something much more interesting is at work beneath the sci-fi gloss than
in its multiplex cousins. Indeed, the media has done much to promote
this as a film that in some way engages with the history of apartheid,
using the 'Otherness' of its aliens to discuss South
Africa's racial Others of recent decades.
There is much within the film itself to support claims that it
exploits the possibilities for social commentary that are inherent in
the science fiction genre. Coming to the screen entrenched in a strong
sense of man's inhumanity to man, District 9 is not satisfied with
its allusions to apartheid but instead looks much deeper into the
history of the 20th century and connects the dots between all the human
cruelty it finds. When van de Merwe warns one of the aliens not to go to
District 10, the new camp built specifically for the visitors, the sense
of urgency and horror in his voice leads one to imagine that inspiration
for the solution to the alien problem might have been drawn from the
Nazi's Final Solution or the Soviet Gulags. These camps were
themselves based on precedents set by the Spanish during the Ten
Years' War, the Americans during the Philippine-American War and
the British during the Boer War in South Africa itself. District
9's District 10 draws on a long and dreadful human heritage of
interment and casts its horrors into an all too imaginable future. Thus
the film suggests that as long as we perceive physical difference, be it
in terms of race or species, to be a signifier of psychical
dissimilarity then such brutalisation will recur.
It is not, however, only historical horrors that are allowed to
emerge into the film text. The underground, militarised experimentation
site operated by the shadowy Multinational United, in which Wikus is
subjected to inhuman cruelty so that information can be gathered about
him, displays more than a passing similarity of function and purpose to
Guantanamo Bay and the so-called CIA 'black sites' across the
globe. The fact that a nongovernmental organisation manages this
operation recalls the farming out of security responsibilities to
Blackwater Worldwide (now Xe) and the profiteering of Haliburton during
the ongoing war in Iraq. Though District 9 makes explicit efforts to
draw connections between its dystopian future and specific historical
atrocities, it also seeks to comment on the current disregard for human
beings displayed in contemporary conflicts. In so doing it suggests that
we are part of our own histories, repeating the brutality of our past
and, if we continue unabated, projecting it into a future where visitors
to our planet will be treated in much the same way as we have treated
and continue to treat each other.
There is hope, however, in the film's suggestion that the
boundaries between Self and Other are permeable. Wikus undergoes a
process of mutation, becoming an alien himself. One of the visitors
makes his own journey from threatening potential terrorist, cooking up a
technological device in a hidden lab in the slum, to protector and
saviour of the weak and wounded Wikus. By the end of his transformation
he has been given a human name, Christopher, and begins to display human
emotions. That which separates man from alien, and hence race from race,
is fragile and perishable; the Self and the Other are ultimately the
same thing.
This marks a drastic change from the science fiction of the 1950s,
from which this film draws stylistically. The bug-eyed aliens and
gigantic monsters that stalked America's cinema screens in the
middle of the 20th century were not there to be understood but to be
eliminated. The overwhelming majority were hostile and intent on our
destruction. Films such as Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957) and The War
of the Worlds (1953) cast aliens as irreconcilably different from and
unremittingly threatening to human beings. Though it lifts some visual
references from these films, District 9 serves to highlight just how far
cinema has come by depicting the human Self and the alien Other as two
halves of the same whole. The message that the film has for the world,
it seems, is that, if science fiction cinema can abandon its age-old
belief that biological (and hence racial) difference equates to manifest
distinctions, why is the rest of the world still cutting each other
open, prejudging one another according to skin colour and responding as
if pigmentation were destiny? This is a science fiction blockbuster that
truly highlights the potential of its medium to challenge the
socio-political status quo.
These are, however, too lofty ambitions for a film with such
populist tendencies. Ultimately the tightrope walk between
respectability and commerciality proves too difficult for District 9. As
the film moves into its final act, and slowly but surely the guns and
robots emerge from the shadows for one final battle, it is pervaded by a
creeping sense of disappointment; all those glittering fragments of
ideas that flashed before our eyes, all those promises of a truly
complicated blockbuster, are killed off just as violently as the cannon
fodder within the diegesis. Just as the more traditional camera work
that creeps into the film forces out the sense of veracity and
significance produced by its early reliance on supposedly found footage
and news reports, so too do the trappings of the Hollywood science
fiction film evacuate the historicity and allegory that the films
utilised early on. District 9 is, in the final analysis, a film that
promises to challenge not just our prejudices, both past and present,
but also the very medium in which this challenge is delivered.
Unfortunately it falls disappointingly short of these laudable goals
with the result that it ends its runtime hiding behind the cliches that
it at first sought to destroy.
Matthew Jones
University of Manchester
