The science is risible: the fiction banal. District 9 is a good B movie with pretensions; and like all good B movies, it rattles along at a pace fast enough for you to almost forgive the cheap n’ cheerful costumes, make-up, special effects and frequently clunky dialogue. A docu-drama, hand-held camera style adds a gritty, mock-realist tone as do the talking heads post-hoc set-up interviews that reinforce the journalistic, documentary tone.

A giant alien spaceship about the size of Kensington arrives from outer space and parks itself a few hundred feet above Johannesburg. The ship and its inhabitants, unlike those in the aforementioned London Borough, have no visible means of support but simply hover with no apparent expenditure of energy (parallels there then) from what none-the-less look like rocket pods on the underside of their ship. There is no disturbance of air or ground beneath the ship. It just hangs there – almost as if it were merely a drawing of a spaceship on a fake background.

Mysteriously, the human inhabitants below leave this uninvited guest unmolested, to block out the sun for 3 months before deciding it might be politic to have a butcher’s. Good job the aliens didn’t actually choose Kensington – the bloody thing would have been clamped within a day and towed off to a compound somewhere in 2. Eventually the authorities enter the ship and discover its alien inhabitants are only marginally less weird than those of the Royal Borough. They are wasp-waisted anthropods with wobbly tendrilled faces – the space-travellers not the Kensingtonites. So with that endearing, typically human response to something or someone new, the visitors are christened ‘Prawns’. On discovery, we are told they are emaciated. I just buy into this, having no idea of my own what an emaciated Prawn actually looks like. I mean, all Prawns look pretty emaciated to me, especially those I get in my starter.

With a deplorable deficiency in town and country planning, the Prawns are ferried to the ground immediately beneath their spaceship where of course being alien and unwelcome they are too lazy to work or move on, dependent upon benefits; and so over 20 years, we are told, create a slum township. Urban blight comes no worse than this. Must have kicked the crap out of property values.

Despite some grandiose reviews to the contrary, for me D9 is a technical triumph of form over content. Designer Philip Ivey’s urban wasteland Production Design and Emilia Roux’ Art Direction combine well to generate a grungy Soweto-style township; and Clinton Shorter’s largely edgy soundtrack softens towards the climax of the film into an almost elegiac tone with a single-voiced African half-chant, half-song counterpointing evocatively the images and unsurprising clichéd narrative outcome. The most innovative thing about D9 is the brilliantly successful, on-line viral-marketing that blogged it into a newsworthy opening weekend in the US. Specialist blogs and a cleverly constructed official web site have fed the incipient paranoia of cyber-surfers around the world longing for an idiotically simple but false trivial explanation for serious, real, complex issues. That they found a ready-made market for this tosh in America does not astonish.

D9 began as a neat little idea and a much seen 8 minute film that explored it. Despite a couple of thousand or so people and a bit of money flung at it – it remains a neat idea, made on the relatively cheap, explorable in about 8 minutes, expanded to a tad under 2 hours. Bullet-headed, bullet-brained stereotypical Afrikaans baddies, working of course for a big bad corporation (MNU) outsourcing social control and re-location of unwanted aliens for an acquiescent South African government, take on with gleeful brutality, the mission of removing a couple of million asylum-seekers from another planet. The aliens are assumed to be dirty, immoral, ugly and parasitic – nothing new there then. When nerdy Wikus van de Merwe (brilliantly played by Sharlto Copley), laughably unqualified for the task, is put in charge of the re-location by his evil father-in-law Piet Smit we are signalled the train wreck to come.

Like the class bully put in charge of the gang for a day, Wikus leads the start of the clearance with all the enthusiasm of a bully victim given the power to redirect the punishment from himself to others. Wikus is all misplaced confidence and no competence so, fiddling like a kid with a mysterious canister, manages to squirt the black liquid contents into his face. The guy’s a complete schmuck and everyone except his pretty, pretty unlikely wife “baybee” his word not mine, knows it.

Much pseudo-scientific bulls**t ensues. Wikus, like an anthropodic re-make of The Fly has screwed up his genetics and is turning into a Prawn. Well to be exact a palpably phoney 3-pronged pincer has been clamped over his own arm to represent his transmutation from nerdy human to nerdy Prawn. ‘Wikupod’ – who knows everything, most of it wrong – also suffers from some nicely observed, revolting but cheaply depicted other symptoms like pulling out his own nails and teeth in between projectile vomiting what looks like what Oil refiners call light atmospheric residue – thin, black, smelly and repulsive – but valuable as an energy source.

In one of a number of magic phenomena that pass for science in this so-called science-fiction movie – like hovering a million ton spacecraft with no expenditure of energy – this magic fluid not only eventually powers the spaceship but also genetically transmutes Wikus into a Prawn in about the 4 day timescale of the action. MNU have of course been conducting, without success, medical experiments on Prawns to explain why only Prawns can make their devastating weapons work. They therefore see half-man, half-Prawn Wikus as the key to unlocking the mystery of how to make the Prawn weapons work. Today the Prawn-gun - tomorrow world domination. Until a bunch of extra-terrestrial lobsters fetch up.

Wikus hides in the only place available - among the Prawns. Once there he hooks up with what I guess we have to call a kind of King Prawn, mysteriously called Christopher which to be honest with no standard of comparison, really doesn’t sound much like a Prawny name to me. Chris has a child, an intelligent, endearing little ‘Shrimp’ who alone amongst the cast, or the audience, likes Wikus. How Shrimp came into being is hard to imagine as D9 is an almost totally female-free zone. Not surprisingly. This is speculation on my part of course as sexing Prawns is not part of my skill set. And sticking what look like bras on the upper part of bodies with no discernible breasts doesn’t really convince.

Chris, Shrimp and Wikus hook up to recover the magic fluid about a pint of which has supposedly taken 20 years to accumulate and is the secret of the escape of the Prawns, though where they are going to escape to, given that apparently their own planet is kaput, is not spelled out. To break into the human lab where the fluid is kept Wikus negotiates to buy some Prawn weapons from a gang of gangster Nigerians who have stockpiled them dreaming of eventually making them work. The Nigerians are of course irreducibly criminal and pathologically, credulously stupid, thinking that eating the flesh of the Prawns will magically transfer their power and access to their weapons to the eater. So the Nigerian gang leader wants to dis-arm Wikus and tuck in to a plate of pincer tartare. I’m not going to even try to unpack the underlying racist stereotypes and patronising condescension here but the way some critics have glossed all this beggars belief. D9 has been called a political allegory – forgive me but allegorical my *rse.

I don’t want to get into a theological dispute about the definition of sci-fi as it used to be humbly known, but bolting together about 2 tons of remaindered girders and scrap metal with no visible hydraulics or alternative means of conveying energy to overcome gravity isn’t science fiction - it’s pseudo-science fantasy. Magic. I can suspend disbelief about Star Trek Phasers, or death rays etc but D9 makes everything, guns, spaceship, robotic transformer-like iron suit etc etc look just like our guns only of coure much much bigger, our weapons, our robots but then simply magics them into action with mere cinematographic trickery – in this case laughably cheapo, unconvincing trickery. That’s ok for films like the Transformer franchise - we know we’re not supposed to take them seriously.

District 9 has its moments of B movie tension largely generated by clever cinematic skill but it remains for me an 8 minute idea inflated beyond credibility; but worse, it is a cleverly web-hyped, internet marketed product which for all its so-called freshness and innovation, still has a Sony Corporation distribution deal to exploit the viral marketing lift-off. Some way off what the Times critic called a sci-fi classic - despite its Blade Runner rip-off ending.

http://www.zettelfilmreviews.co.uk

Post Script: Science-Fiction

This is not intended as a definition: trying to define a 'genre' misunderstands the 'grammar' of an artistic genre which must remain fluid and subject to expansion and change over time. This is more an observation.

It is accepted by the genre that Extra Terrestrial vistors to our planet are more 'advanced' than us. That by advanced we mean technologically advanced is demonstrated first by the fact that they got to us and we couldn't, yet, get to them. For dramatic purposes we generally, but not always, give them weapons that make them invincible technologically. The fundamental premise of Science-Fiction it seems to me is that however advanced they may be, alien technology must operate in, conform to the same natural world we do - with gravity, friction etc. Science-fiction for me must recognise this limit. This is good, for it is the limit all art needs to generate the imagination and creativity to convince us that this limit can be mastered. This is why Wells's classic War Of The Worlds is a brilliant work of the imagination for he finds the way to defeat the Martians not in superior weaponry, technology, but through their mortal lack of defense against a tiny organic threat that the smallest human baby posesses. This category distinction is precisely what the recent re-make lacked and despite its many merits, why it could not match the poetic power of the ending of the orginal film based upon Wells' conception.

Another paradigm - this time from movies. It is said that for its time, in the light of the known science when it was made, Kubrick's 2001 - a Space Odyssey was as faithful to known science as any film then or since. Kubric, like Wells, embraced the known scientific constraints of the natural world and this profoundly affected the visual aesthetic of his film. Just accepting the way people would actually have to move in a weightless enviroment generated a poetic quality to the imagery but was a challenge to the dramatic pace he could achieve. Hence the tone of detachment 'other-worldliness' that characterises the film and perfectly sets up the final development of the narrative satisfyingly.

This is why I think District 9 is wrongly called Science-Fiction. Its particpants do not credibly overcome the limits of the natural world - no, through the aesthetic misuse of camera technology they are made to just magically act as if the limits don't exist. Magic for me is fantasy. Nothing wrong with that: but if your narrative is fantasy based why clunk it all up by furnishing your characters with weapons, vehicles, artifacts every one of which looks just like ours but bigger. And magic. That's lazy fantasy. For fantasy also needs some form of limit, some sense of what apparently cannot be done: without that limit, when the imagination of the artist takes us beyond it and convinces us, we lose precisely the sense of fantasy and thereby precisely what delights, terrifies, entrances us about what we see and hear.

You seem to be reviewing the marketing as much as the film here.

"an 8 minute idea inflated beyond credibility; but worse, it is a cleverly web-hyped, internet marketed product which ... still has a Sony Corporation distribution deal."

You must have a major problem with Sony if you think a Sony distribution deal is worse than narrative flaws (of which I agree the film has many).

Interesting...although I thought this film was meant to be a satire of apartheid, rather than "proper" sci-fi?..

Well, I think we must have been watching two completely different films because I disagree with you totally. I thought this film was great. I didn't think the sci-fi was so bad that I had to over suspend my disbelief, but them I'm not a sci-fi uber-geek.

I also thought that the political sub-text, mistreatment of immigrant populations, was very skillfully done in that it made for very uncomfortable viewing. For a large portion of the beginning of the film, it was difficult to sympathise with anybody. The Prawns were generally unlikeable and the host humans were vile, with their grudging, borderline fascistic rules, wrapped up as hospitality. I don't think it mattered that they were Afrikaans. That was just because the movie was set in South Africa. It wasn't meant to be an accurate portrayal of a nation. It was intended to be a comment on attitudes.

Yes, the Nigerians were a stereotype, but I saw them as more of a metaphor too. Immigrants do tend to come in waves, because they tend to be leaving behind specific periods of strife. So within the film, the human immigrants that mixed with the prawns would have had to have had a national identity of some sort. And the film makers could hardly press the realism button and called them Zimbabweans. It would just have caused more trouble in South Africa, where the Zimbabweans are currently getting beaten up and chased out on a regular basis. They happened to call them Nigerians. But, in fact, their cannibalistic witchcraft habits were more reminiscent of some other African nations. (Just try and be an albino in some parts of Africa at the moment.) So, I saw them as more of a composite character that needed to go under a single name for purely narrative purposes.

The aliens are assumed to be dirty, immoral, ugly and parasitic – nothing new there then.

That was the whole point. The film turned the spotlight on how immigrant populations tend to be treated, how their characters tend to be assumed. (And actually, to go back a point, this was also reflected in how the Nigerians were portrayed.) I think it did this well and I think it achieved this by making it difficult for us to sympathise with anyone in the beginning. As it happened, the Prawns happened to be thoroughly unlikeable anyway, on account of having different, outer space habits, like derailing trains for fun. But that's the whole point about equal rights - it's equal rights to be unpleasant as well as equal rights to be integrated.

In creating unlikable characters, this film made us really work to reach our sympathies and I don't think that's a bad thing. Hollywood tends to present things far too easily, which can make for lazy viewing. Overall, I thought the film was good and probably one of the better ones I've seen for a while.

Apart from that, I just have one bone to pick, Zettel. You have managed to give away a lot of plot in this review, almost to the point of the ending, which is not hard to infer from what you have written. That's a bad review, in my book.

Saw this last night and thought it was pretty good, actually - quite unlike anything I've seen in recent years.

In creating unlikable characters, this film made us really work to reach our sympathies and I don't think that's a bad thing.

Totally agree with this. The first twenty minutes or so was almost funny, although it definitely felt awkward to to be laughing at both the "good" and the "bad" guys (although even then, it wasn't immediately clear who belonged to which camp). The way in which the film steered audience sympathies - you end up rooting for the main character, who should technically be classed as one of the "baddies" simply by virtue of his skin colour and job, but you also begin to feel very sorry indeed for the aliens, which is no mean feat considering they're absolutely grotesque to look at - was, I thought, very impressive.

(Incidentally, Nigerian gangs *are* a big problem in South Africa - most of the violence you hear about today is perpetrated by immigrants from Nigeria, Angola, Congo and Zim who are often involved in a lucrative drug and arms trade).

'Guys'

A lot of flak. Some of of it deserved.

First things first:

Spoiler: Blade Runner was released with 3 different endings as I recall counting original cinema release, re-release, at least one later directors cut and DVD. I don't think therefore what I said gave away how this one ends. You will see reviews of mine where I give a spoiler alert. If the Blade Runner reference is the issue all I can say is that at least two national reviews picked up the same point and printed it. Sorry though if you feel otherwise. No part of my wish to spoil films in that way.

On the promotion issue: yes I made a point of this because this was cleverly, knowingly and intentionally virally marketed to make it seem different and by implication outside the normal coroporate hype that sells movies. My point was only that this was just as corporately backed, especially on widespread Distribution which is the be all and end all of box office success especially in the US and US publicity travels. So many excellent films get little or no distributiona and it irritated me to find this one for me sailing under false colours in generating the kind of box office they manipulated on opening weekend in the US.

I can't disagreee with your various arguments about politics as I didn't find a non-stereotypical character in the whole film. The documentary style for me was palpably fake and the combination of stereotypical characters and pseudo-ET sentimentality of the Prawn storyline made it impossible for me to take the claims of satire, still less allegory seriously.

But that's how it struck me. Many if not most of the national critics were much closer to your response than mine. I neither relish nor complain about that. When critics I admire take a similar view to me I take some pleasure in that but even one of the best critics ever, Pauline Kael wrote some reviews I totally disagreed with.

It is clear your various responses are genuine and truthful and I accept and respect that. Mine are too. That's how it should, indeed must be.

I picked up the sci-fi theme because it interested me.

As ever, thanks for the comments.

regards

Z

I like to watch District 9 movie in my spare time. This is action and Sci-Fi Movie director by Neill Blomkamp and Writers are Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell.

Must have missed this review the first time, Z. I thought this film was utter shite, apart from the last part where it became a not too bad shoot-em-up, which at least gave me something to watch without laughing. I'm an SF writer and really don't see any point in a film that uses SF to no apparent end, i.e. this story is clearly about apartheid, so why not just make a film about apartheid? What's the benefit in swapping prawns for black people? Besides that, the film is full of ridiculous coincidences and deus ex machina(s), e.g. the white hero just happening to bump into the alien who's built an escape ship (in amongst thousands of aliens) and at just the moment he's finishing it. Not to mention all that nonsense about the prawns being addicted to cat food. Ho hum. But I guess all you have to do is add some grit and use hand held cameras for people to believe there's something significant being said.

Totally agree with this:

This is why I think District 9 is wrongly called Science-Fiction. Its particpants do not credibly overcome the limits of the natural world - no, through the aesthetic misuse of camera technology they are made to just magically act as if the limits don't exist.

Foot note: one of the top SF magazines, Redstone, rejected a story of mine recently (even though the editor said he loved it) because it didn't pass his 'swap out' test, by which he means, could this story have worked just as well without an SF element? Pity he didn't advise on this film.

In the summer time this is funny, touchy, Interesting and bloody movie...

This is a good movie to watch ..