District 9: Prawns ala Jackson, aka CGIFriday in Fullerton

Skynet: California would like to welcome our newest writer, Mr. Finski. A cunning linguist and hot air balloon enthusiast, Finski has something to say about District 9. It has something to do with aliens as far as I can tell.

As I settled into the red velveteen chairs at the Fullerton AMC in culturally bereft Orange County yesterday, I hoped for one thing out of this Peter Jackson action flick: alien splatter. Such was my simple hope, and I can attest that the director of the famous Tolkien "LotR" saga brought the gore home in this film. He likewise brought urine, vomit, viscera, teeth, fingernails, and interspecies fornication. For $10, I left happy. In the end, District 9 (directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, produced by Peter Jackson) had more nutritional value than the cardboard popcorn and the chemically-flavored Diet Coke I purchased for $9.75. Next time, I'll bring my own snacks.

To be fair, however, aliens versus gun-toting humans rarely leaves me displeased. I rank horror fare in the following order of highest to lowest: zombies, aliens, werewolves, vampires, undead (minor variant on zombies), and psycho killers. So when I saw the trailer for District 9, and I noticed that Peter Jackson, creator of 1992's little-known gem Dead-Alive (released in the states as the lamely-titled Braindead), had brought this apparent alien slaughter effort to the theaters, I promised I would see it with no impedance. I would see it without reading a review, knowing anything whatsoever about the plot outside of what the trailer promised, and I would try to catch a poorly attended screening. Myriad idiots in a theater can only decrease my enjoyment. I recall watching noontime screenings of Blue Velvet in 1986 and Reservoir Dogs in 1992. I was alone after three other people left David Lynch's Reagan era masterpiece in the first half an hour, and five strangers joined me to watch the entire visual blitzkrieg of Tarantino's crime spree frolic in the fall 17 years ago. Great violence, human oddity, alienation, and disjunct plot twists belong to a smattering of oddballs like me, and too many bodies in a theater seem to ruin my joy. I want the freak experience but I like it in a remote setting with a BIG screen and velveteen seats. District 9 at the Fullerton AMC delivered on all but the numbers, as there were about 25 poeple in the theater for a 4:20 show. But that wasn't too bad for a such a major release as this. It might have been far worse, and in the end, the audience was fine. No one talked, texted, or interrupted the film so it all worked out well. Reactions to action were appropriate, so this time, I was gathered with like-minded twistos, and this made me very happy.

Joining me in this effort were two close friends; Stephen and Lacey, the former a fellow teacher and the latter his teacher-fiancee. Neither knew much of the plot either, so we three purists walked into Fullerton's megaplex emotionally unarmed and prepped for whatever attacked our senses. I will relate below as much of the blow-by-blow, splatter-by-pop action as I can recall 24 hours later as I type this. I do not post spoilers, but truthfully, if you think this movie is trying to make you think it's The Crying Game, don't bother. It has a certain highbrow subtlety in it somewhere, but this is a great big sci-fi, alien~killer flick, and Jane Austen has nothing to do with the script. It's like telling someone who wins the war before they see Gone With the Wind ... if that gets them mad, they are too stupid to watch the movie anyway.

As District 9 begins, it looks and feels a bit like Cloverfield. There is the handcam-method employed throughout, and the video-to-film crossover that has become the new Blair Witch concept of CGI action movies the last ten years or so. Right away, I start to get that woozy, I-wish-I-didn't-wolf-my-popcorn&soda-feeling. If you have vestibular system concerns, this might not be your best choice for a two-hour experience. Stephen and Lacey had issues with it, but I bit down hard and managed to pass the nausea by the halfway point, as did Lacey. Stephen was still reeling at movie's end, but he's the art-house type. He actually watches 'Masterpiece Theater' ...

In any event, the film is set in Johannesburg, South Africa in current day, where we see a ginormous alien vessel (similar to Independence Day's mondo skyships, or perhaps a bit of Spielberg's Close Encounters spacecraft of the 70s) hovering over the city. Through narration & interviews by a newsreel-documentary clearly created AFTER some sort of disaster-cataclysm, we learn it hovered there for 20 years. During that time, no attacks by the aliens occurred, so early on, a human military team boards the ship. On it are found over a million aliens, malnourished, filthy, and clearly dying if not given aid. Down on African terra firma, a refugee camp springs up, and for the two decades that precede the film's main action, it is obvious these aliens, nicknamed by the slur of "prawns" by the Afrikaans and native people of South Africa, become an economic hardship for the country.

Enter the film's version of the UN, called MNU for Multi-National United. An MNU force, led by a paper-pushing, wormy geek named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley in his major-market acting debut) is appointed to issue eviction notices to the 20-year resident prawns of the District 9 province, the alien ghetto's official name and the reason for the film's cryptic nomenclature. When imagining the setting here, think Hoovervilles with a decided Palestinian, Gaza strip feel, and you'll understand how allegorical this part of the film feels.

Merwe starts off rather annoying, and I was certain he'd be alien meat by the first reel's end. Yet, he grows on you, and he grows in other ways consistent with the film's sci-fi plot, too. But Merwe is an anti-hero protagonist indeed. Like Charlie Babbitt in Rainman, you think this guy is a jackass, a clown, and that he deserves a first class ass-kicking. But like Charlie Babbitt, he exonerates himself as the film progressess, with great suffering and at great personal loss to himself. Merwe gets kicked, slapped, and smacked about to be sure. He even gets a first rate antagonist, a macho, military team commanding mope who must back-up MNU on this dirty job; he is a flat-bastard SOB military stud straight out of HALO. He loves killing prawns, and he brings extra ammo just so he can kill them with gay abandon. I tried finding the actor's name on the IMDB site, but the film is so rampant with nobody actors, it's like trying to buy a vowel on Al Jazeera's version of "Wheel of Fortune" ... I gave up after the fifteenth character named 'MNU Guard' with no photo came up on the filmsite. Suffice it to say, 'MNU Bastard Killer HALO Guy' makes it well into the final scenes of the film, and he gets a roaring send off. This is not unexpected, so it is not a spoiler. If you think it is, please do me a favor - do not vote or breed. Just stay home and watch Fox News or "One Tree Hill" ... thank you.

Back to the story - Merwe wants to do this eviction task by the book, and the eye-rolling of the soldiers towards the desk-jockey in charge is familiar to anyone who loved the interplay of the cast in 1986's Aliens. What Paul Reiser was to Bill Paxton's crew of grizzled marines in space, Merwe is to these prawn-mashing, take-no-prisoner, modern day gladiators. It's formula, but in this film, it works. It is a vehicle to get the plot moving because there is an ongoing sense that something really bad will happen soon, and happen it does, in vivid color.

In a subplot, we learn that Merwe is a married man, whose father-in-law saddled him with this media-nightmare of knocking on alien doors in a biohazard ghetto that makes modern day images of Somalia, Darfur, and Baghdad look like Bel Air. Yet, Merwe is gung-ho, can understand prawn language (which the viewer gets subtitles for, understandably), and he gleefully directs the camera that follows him to get the details of this co-civilian/martial endeavor in all its gory glory. Now, Merwe's father-in-law is an archvillain, megacorporate, Dick Cheney type, Haliburton executive, and later developments of the plot are clearly manipulated by his character. Again, it is a familiar structure, but because District 9 does not try to be a psychological treatise on the military-industrial complex, it doesn't drag the plot out. It just drops it in front of you and lets you pick up on it or not. If you don't get it early, you'll get it later. Just watch because District 9 moves at about 75 mph throughout the first quarter of the film, and only slows to 65 for the last three-fourths. This is rapid fire stuff, and it is ferret-attention span friendly.

So, the hope of MNU is to relocate the prawn-refugees 200 kilometers away from South Africa's capital, apparently to that region's equivalent of San Bernardino, where the only people who will care about the filthy, crime doing, cat-food eating, scraggy-looking aliens will be the extras left over from the set of The Gods Must Be Crazy. Several eviction notice scenes are shown, with soldiers playing the role of modern day My Lai massacre monsters, and with the obvious memories of South Africa's apartheid era clear for all to see as well. This aspect of District 9 is what works best. It lets you the viewer discern the level of the symbolism, of what is concrete and what is abstract. Take whatever you want from it, because the action won't tarry for long.

Before 30 minutes of this 112 minute journey are over, however, the real conflict rears its otherworldy head: Merwe gets exposed to a black alien fluid from a confiscated canister he couldn't keep his clerical schnoz out of. So begins the major plot, as our human hero becomes infected by alien illness. He coughs, feels nausea, eats some fast food to coat his stomach, then projectile vomits several times. Not to be out done, plenty of prawns void their urethras, gullets, and nether regions as well, and a few bloodlettings of prawns by humans, and humans by prawns, color the shaky-view screen for our enjoyment. Courtesy of the camera's movement, combined with the aliens fighting tooth and nail to resist eviction, you may well start to join Merwe in a pretty honest portrayal of what this mythical alien concentration camp might look, feel, and smell like. I counsel eating no greasy, salty, or spicy meals prior to seeing this film, lest you wish to mimic Merwe . . . matter of fact, the Wii version of this may have a Vomi-attachment for electro-gacking onto your carpet at home, complete with a cross promotion with Resolve carpet cleaner. If this happens, just remember, I said it first!

As the film develops, an interesting thing happens, however. Two prawns become crucial to the plot, and through them, sympathy switches in the audience, quite purposefully, I am sure, to the filmmakers' intentions. Meet Alien #1 - Christopher Johnson (played by Jason Cope, whoever he is, utterly unrecognizeable under his squid tentacles and exoskeletal CGIsuit). Christopher is the prawn who has a plan to leave earth by re-boarding the hovering ship, returning home, and saving his people. His sidekick, Alien #2, is his toddler son, Little CJ. CJ is as close as this film comes to being a kid-flick, as I'm sure a doll of little CJ is forthcoming. Unlike the Ewok dolls of the early 80s however, if a CJ doll wets himself in the home version, you'll need a biohazard suit to clean up the stuff that jets from his orifices.

The last half of District 9 thereby becomes the Merwe & Christopher show. Merwe becomes the hunted one, as his infection & subsequent mutations make him wanted by the bioweapons division of MNU, while Christopher tries to keep his son alive and somehow re-capture the black fluid canister which contains the fuel he needs to fly his hidden spaceship up to the mothership, redock, and get his prawn ass home again. Of course, Merwe starts to see the goodness in this fatherly prawn, and Christopher starts to appreciate Merwe's predicament. But it is not a clean and easy characterization. There are moments when you wonder if double crosses are going to happen, and as good plots go, this one allows for a few ironic hesitations, and I appreciated that it wasn't all as neat and tidy of a script as I assumed it would be. It isn't Melville, but it isn't as inane and insipid as Dan Brown's ignoramus DaVinci Code leaps of stupidity either.

Along the way of Merwe and Christopher's odyssey, Nigerian underworld figures, evil MNU soldiers, biotech chemists, weapons testers, black magic voodoo hookers, and a mess of alien-DNA activated ray guns enter, exit, and just say hello to the viewer at warp speed, while a googleplex of humans and prawns go pop, glurg, splat, and arrrrgh while instantly dissipating into smears of red, black, blue, and green in all of CGI's imagineered glory. One particular sequence involves Merwe manning a prawn cybertank, straight out of Robocop's badborg ED209. It allows for the requisite shootout, chase scene that every decent western has had since the genre was first mastered by Howard Hawkes and John Ford, and if you replaced Merwe and Christopher with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe in the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma, the only difference would be the weaponry. Likewise, my fave moment involves an alien-monstro grenade imbedding itself into a Nigerian gangsta's cranium, hanging out for a blue-glowing two-second count as the fellow realizes his time has come, and then the whole mess goes up in computer-generated happy happy. Jesus wept, but I love a "He blowed up REAAAL GOOD" scene in a flick, and that qualifies as the best one in some time for this sicko.

District 9 is a summer action film and I'd rate it a 9 if I wasn't the biggest bastard ever. I gave a 9 to Aliens and The Fly 23 years ago, and those films were really, really good and truly classic. I have never rated an action film a 10 because I save that number for films like Harold and Maude and Rashomon. So, giving District 9 an 8/10 is a high compliment for an old curmudgeon like me. I liked that it left room for a sequel, but again, it didn't beat you over the head with it. It just allows for the possibility that there may be a District 10 around the next corner, in a summer far, far away, where the prawns and the humans will one day eviscerate each other again.

~ Finski "Not As Fat as Ebert or as Dead as Siskel"