For hard-core, hard-R action fans who prefer Aliens to
Minority Report and Rambo to G.I. Joe, Neill
Blomkamp’s District 9 is the raw, uncut stuff; it’s a 12-round
heavyweight bout overflowing with scenes of spectacular tension and
brutality. There’s a germ of something larger here in its dark
depiction of humanity’s first contact with alien life forms. But the
film might be far less objectionable if the filmmakers hadn’t tried so
feebly to connect its images with contemporary reality.

Using a pseudo-documentary style, District 9 recounts the
fate of a gigantic alien spaceship that stalls out over Johannesburg,
South Africa. Humans board the ship and “rescue” its inhabitants,
insectile creatures who are immediately thrown into a makeshift slum
near the city’s outskirts. Twenty years after the ship’s arrival, Wikus
Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a clueless, careerist bureaucrat working
for the Multi-National United (MNU) corporation, is chosen to evacuate
the aliens from their shantytowns and move them to a newer site even
further from the city. Things do not go as planned, however. Through a
series of mishaps, Wikus is exposed to alien technology that causes
grotesque side effects and sparks the interest of the MNU’s researchers
and executives, who see in Wikus an answer to their longstanding
problems with extraterrestrial bioweaponry.

The visual and auditory echoes of real-world social organizations
— MNU trucks that look like UN peacekeeping forces, intensely
voyeuristic and mindless hordes of television cameras beaming violent
images around the world, alien ghettos reminiscent not just of South
African townships but of intolerable slums in any 21st century megacity
— keep intruding on the pure, brainless sensory overload Blomkamp
really wants to give his audience. And although such historical
allusions are soon dispatched in favor of a much more traditional
chase-action film format, the aftertaste lingers. The surface of the
film should appall anyone up on current events, not because of its
resonance but because of its shallowness.

The human beings in District 9 are as shallow as the
filmmaker’s superficial nods to historical oppression; in many ways
this movie is as grimly misanthropic as a cheaply made horror flick.
Even when compared to the sadistic, cold-blooded mercenary that tries
to hunt him down, Wikus remains a small-minded, self-serving
opportunist who lacks patience, tolerance, and any sense of common
decency. His highly unlikely change of heart cannot possibly come from
some dawning realization about his place in the cosmos. It probably
comes from the alien DNA coursing through his veins.

What’s left is aggressive, overwrought technique unmoored from any
clear moral, ethical, or even entertainment-based concerns, giving
viewers a movie that’s frequently intense but never exciting and
frequently violent but never cathartic. Its grating, grinding tension
will wear down all but the hardiest fans, who will chortle in delight
at its gruesome annihilations. The gritty, handheld camera work first
popularized in serious war films like Saving Private Ryan seems
to have reached its endpoint here. The blood-spattered camera-lens
effect seems similarly used up, although treating humans as ketchup
packets is the film’s only moderately amusing example of wit.