Cast: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Screenplay: Neill Blomkamp

Running-time: 1 hr 52 mins

Genre: Sci-fi/Action


CRITIQUE:


2009 had been a momentous year for sci-fi. Unless you’ve been living underground for the past few months, the genre has witnessed a recent technological reinvention in the mainstream field with James Cameron’s technical-and-visual show-off Avatar and the cinematic resuscitation of the nearly-dying, if not dead, sci-fi franchise Star Trek. Throw in along with these lot District 9, a relatively unknown, lo-fi sci-fi. Coming out of nowhere and assembled in shoestring budget miles beneath Avatar or Trek’s gargantuan pile of bucks, on paper this stands no chance pitted against these behemoths. Then, turns out to only to smash the genre completely out of its evergreen park. Consider District 9, for once, an unexpected reinvention and revivifying of the tired clichés we know of many science-fiction films, where mostly all are located in glimmering Americana and alien invasions signal either a shot of the White House being laser-beamed to dust or thousands of Manhattanites gaping above at a sparkly spaceship. Well, forget those as District 9 directly plunges us into a post-apartheid South Africa where alien invasion doesn’t involve human carnage and hostility but rather a giant migraine for the Johannesburg government.


It is bracingly knowing, even courageous to suggest an allegory of Africa’s dark past, and where other sci-fi movies this year take place in space, (Avatar exploits Pandora, Star Trek hangs around black holes and Moon frolics around, well, the moon) District 9 is firmly rooted in our own terra firma, thrillingly mixing a pseudo-documentary aesthetic with a very grim socio-political commentary. Newsreels, staged interviews and shaky-cams, now in vogue in this post-Blair Witch and Cloverfield era, are employed to create a sense of urgency around the city ridden with alien immigrant, all of whom are fenced inside a decaying inner city slum reminiscent of the City of God favelas. The comparison is not without reason – gang crime, prostitution and blood-splattering violence litter around its streets. But unlike many sci-fi actioners, the prawn-like extra-terrestrials mean no harm and are racially shunted by a xenophobic government. Even its main protagonist (a multi-layered performance by newcomer Sharlto Copley, whose dialogues were mostly improvised) is a giddy, white-skinned and white-collared government-agent-cum-media-buffoon, more than willing to head the relocation of these slum insectoids, so gleeful yet malicious in his job, taking lengths to burning alien cocoons. But after being sprayed by a dodgy alien fluid, he transforms into a blithering, cowering half-human, half-blackened lobster on the run from the agency he works for.