Having finally (if a week and a half after it's opening can seem like a long time) gotten to see the sleeper hit of the summer,
District 9, last night, I came away as impressed with the movie, and rookie director Neill Blomkamp as I'd been hearing. There are a number of factors that make
District 9 impressive, from being a science fiction thriller with more on its mind than just pyrotechnics -- although delivering a highly satisfying stream of those -- to actually telling a coherent story with characters worth caring about.
In fact, there's a list on
Film Junk of the "5 Lessons Hollywood Can Learn from
District 9" (the list with my thumbnail descriptions -- for the full thing read the piece):
1. Audiences Appreciate Originality
Yes, there are lots of elements from other pictures mashed into this one, but it has a new attitude, i.e. in the alien apartheid theme, resonantly set in post-real life apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa.
2. Experience Isn’t Everything
Director Blomkamp was backed by producer Peter Jackson to direct a huge budget version of blockbuster videogame Halo when Hollywood got nervous, backed out, leaving them to rebound with this proof of talent.
3. Blockbuster Budgets are Bloated
See the movie and try to wrap your mind around this: District 9 only cost $30 million to make, i.e. the equivalent of about fifteen minutes of Spiderman 3. Guess which one is richer and more entertaining.
4. Mystery Draws People In
And I'll try not to spoil too much, but there will be MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.
5. Action is More Thrilling When It’s Rated R
No argument here.
I find it interesting that the site I've quoted has the word "junk" in the title because what I'll address in this post is the success of the "junk aesthetic" in the movie.
District 9 takes place in the midst of tremendous amounts of junk. This is the essential poverty experience, the Soweto of the movie, with Nigerians running black markets in the alien quarantine area as a reminder of the world's biggest slum in
Lagos. In this incarnation of poverty, aliens pick through huge garbage piles to survive, decorate or build elements of their shacks with garbage, and even look something like collections of junk themselves, albeit in the "prawn" form that gives them their negative nickname.
Lead actor, an unknown until last week, Sharlto Copley, looks a bit of mess when we first meet him (and gets worse as the picture goes on) and is in essence a non-valuable item in Hollywood terms, i.e. a leading man with zero name recognition (or negative, considering how unusual and new to pronounce his name is to non-South Africans), i.e. junk. And director Blomkamp was junked by Hollywood prior to making this picture.
Indeed,
District 9 is almost entirely shot documentary style, with surveillance camera POV's popping in for visual continuity here and there, as handheld is essentially the "junk" style of shooting, i.e. "run 'n' gun", rather than the majestic tableau shot of classic science fiction films from the 1920's through the 1950's, peaking with Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey but just as much the dominant style of the
Star Wars hexology. Prior to, say,
Battlestar Galactica, which made space battle seem like documentary war footage, old matte technology and even motion control cameras required some degree of stasis or stability in shooting in order not to reveal the seams of the layered fx compositing. Here the jerky footage of CGI aliens picking through junk heaps or mixing it up in spasmatic, bloody confrontations with humans seem 100% genuine, a you-are-there feel.
In the real world, it's poverty that makes those stricken human beings appear expendable to the more fortunate. How often have we heard, "Bomb them all!" in reference to corruption infested slums or the poor-as-dirt terrorist breeding grounds of the Middle East? Clean people up and they suddenly have value, but in their most degraded state, starving and emaciated in Ethiopia, or refuges ravaged by war, how often is the reaction that they should just go ahead and die, we'll all be better off -- themselves included.
Here it's the aliens whose non-human, insect or shrimp-like appearance, caked in poverty, who seem infinitely expendable. So it is the linchpin achievement of
District 9 that we develop empathetic feelings towards two in particular, father and son prawn. And herein lies the key to the movie's originality, actually a synthesis of underground or counterculture aesthetics that have been building from the hippies through the punks all the way to Burning Man and beyond, the turning of what other people discard into something useful, fascinating, useful, valuable, beautiful.
The core storytelling trope here is the second look, the reversal that comes from Copley's transformation from go-along mid-level bureaucrat to self-sacrificing action hero, the shack that can be a key, the weapons that are junk unless a being with the right DNA pulls the trigger (and then marvel at the plasmatic destruction that follows), the prawns who can be more than the drones you've come to expect. Like the magnetic powers of one particularly brilliant alien weapon that collects the bullets fired at it and then blasts them all back, Blomkamp revels in the expectations about himself and his "little" film that he fashions with whizzing speed and rock-solid cinematic expertise into a great big science fiction action classic.
Every once in a while there's this kind of independent triumph, recalling the sleeper success of the first
Terminator movie, with "junk" actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unknown director and cast, that can instantly turn into a major franchise. Blomkamp pokes sly fun at the
Halo debacle late in the picture when, in file documentary footage, Copley's character proudly displays a wallet-sized snapshot of his wife in her bridal veil, emphasizing how much it looks like an angel's halo.
Well, if any studio wants to resume making the movie version of
Halo with Blomkamp I'm betting he won't come half as cheap as he would have the first time around. And Blomkamp would have to ask himself why bother with someone else's intellectual property, now that he has a not-dissimilar human vs. alien
District 10 sequel squarely set up by the conclusion of this picture.
With the reversal of
District 9 winning hearts, minds and box office, he's turned an original i.p. (i.e. "junk") into a potential entertainment industry. And with the same achievement, ironically, devalued
Halo as late-coming movie competitor.
Junk into gold. Gold into junk.
Alchemy.
