Final Thoughts on District 9 [Spoilers]

After a consultation with Dr. Teeth, I've decided to post a few more thoughts on District 9. First and foremost, I want to talk about how great it is to see the moribund science fiction genre getting a facelift. I'm tempted to locate the start of this trend around the 2002 Soderbergh remake of Solaris. Solaris, a 4 hour, thoroughly impenetrable Tarkovsky film from the 1970s, was a pretty huge project to take on. The 2002 remake flopped, but the fact that it was made at all may have been indicative of renewed interest in the genre.

Since then we've had a run of decent-to-great scifi movies: 28 Days Later, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shaun of the Dead, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Serenity, War of the Worlds, Children of Men, Sunshine, Cloverfield, Star Trek IX, Moon, and District 9.

I want to single out Sunshine and District 9 here, because they share a very important similarity: they both fall down on their premise.

The first half of Sunshine is compelling because the crew has so little agency. They're constantly reacting to the latest disaster thrust on them by an uncaring solar system, and that struggle to survive (and concurrent emotional/social accommodations the crew must make) is what keeps the audience involved. Then, inexplicably, they introduce an implausible malefactor into the mix. Not only is it unnecessary, it at odds with the entire tone of the movie up to that point. The change is jarring enough that it takes the audience entirely out of the flow of the movie, resulting in unpleasant metacommentary: why doesn't this dude have any skin and why God why would that make him super-strong?

District 9 also includes some strange shifts in tone. The movie begins as a documentary, and we're introduced to the setting through interviews with experts, witnesses, and of course, Wikus. At some point, however, it becomes impossible to tell the story in documentary form. Wikus goes off the grid and the movie shifts dramatically in tone, becoming an action/adventure flick. That wouldn't be a problem, except that D9 then reverts back to a hybrid format of news/documentary for the final 10-20 minutes. It's an odd choice, as it draws attention to the abrupt shifts in tone without really adding all that much to the movie. The final moments of the movie use documentary interviews to ask really obvious questions (basically, "will there be a sequel?") and tie up a few loose ends. A side effect of this choice is that we lose some of the immediacy of the action (it turns out that a guy tearing shit up in an alien battlesuit is less compelling when seen from a helicopter and framed by a chyron) and the questions posed by the talking heads are glaringly obvious--I'm not sure we needed them asked directly into the camera.

District 9 [Spoilers]

Briefly, the plot of District 9 is that an alien mothership drifts to a halt above Johannesburg, and after three months humans penetrate the interior to find a group of starving, malnourished aliens inside. They promptly relocate these unfortunates to the Soweto-like D9. There, tensions build between prawn and human until the government authorizes the mediocre-yet-sinister Multinational United to conduct a second round of resettlement to an encampment 200 miles outside the city.

Now, before I get all serious on you, I'd like to take a moment to reassure you that I did, in the darkness and comfort of the movie theatre, say things like "dude needs an AA for arm-eating" and "what the fuck are you doing Wikus, strap the fuck in!" In neither case did the movie disappoint. As a storming-the-barricades-with-energy-weapons tale of righteous redemption, it's everything you could hope for.

When you dig a little deeper into the scenery, however, District 9 starts to decay a bit.

The film juxtaposes the "honest" savagery of the Nigerian gangsters in D9 against the corporate condescension of MNU. The Nigerians relentlessly and shamelessly exploit the prawns, but they never turn on their own, and they seem to have a pretty sweet racket going on. They get to charge exorbitant prices for cat food, amass alien weaponry, and ritually consume the occasional prawn appendage. It's a living.

In contrast, MNU is possessed of a relentless hunger that's unchecked by any bonds. Throughout the movie, every act of brutality carried out by the Nigerians is matched or exceeded (either in scope or cruelty) by MNU. At the most basic level, this points to a problem of motivational incoherence on the part of MNU. Like the similarly-named Umbrella Corporation in the Resident Evil series, Multinational United completely embraces the "why do this right when we could do it EVIL?" approach to corporate decisionmaking.

Aside: Resident Evil 2 is the most baldfaced demonstration of that ethos. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Mila Jovovovovovich vehicle, the plot goes something like this: a bumbling Umbrella Corporation strike team unleashes the zombie apocalypse. An Umbrella corporate overlord decides to "handle" the situation by using Raccoon City as a proving ground for their most advanced bioweapon, and their very first test of that weapon involves straight-up murdering the entire Raccoon City police force.

Something rather similar occurs in D9 when the bigwigs decide that they need to liquify every ounce of Wikus' biomass to "get his DNA." (What?) Conveniently, they make this decision over the restrained-but-conscious Wikus, who somewhat predictably hulks out and escapes. It's also worth noting that one of the oligarchs is Wikus' father-in-law, who, two scenes later, demonstrates a heretofore unseen level of cunning by lying to his daughter ("Can I see Wikus?" "No." "Okay.") about her husband's condition. You'd think he might've had the presence of mind to plot the blenderizing of his son-in-law behind closed doors.

In other words, D9 capitalizes on cheap anti-corporate sentiment. Now, I'm not an expert, but in my experience most corporations don't randomly choose to diversify into the lucrative "horrible atrocities" market. The CEO of Whole Foods is not terribly popular at the moment, but not because he announced that he uses the tears of unborn children as a sweetener in the 365 line of products. By the time D9 gets around to MNU's poorly-secured alien corpse-fucking division the movie has already established a rich tapestry of disgusting colonial attitudes around MNU and the entire scene feels unnecessary.

In the end, D9 commits its greatest sin by mapping basic textures onto complicated themes. By the end of the movie we have a white corporate strike team storming a black tribal compound so that they can fuck up a racial/corporate Judas wearing an alien battlesuit.

On the other hand, I would (and did) pay $10 to see that.