Way Too Late Movie Review – "District 9"

If there’s one thing that being snowed in for two days is good for, it’s catching up on my movie watching. So in between bouts of shoveling out my car (because my landlord is an asshole who didn’t get our parking lot plowed until 9:00 Sunday night), I managed to finally sit down and watch District 9. As with most of the movies that I watch way too late, D9’s reputation preceded it. Most of what I had read on the Internet said that the first half of the movie, with its faux-documentary style was great, but that the second half devolved into just another action movie. What I was expecting was a hard line, a moment where the documentary ended and the action movie started, but it wasn’t quite as cut and dry as that.

Throughout the movie the style seems to shift back and forth. Even during action sequences the movie will cut to security camera footage of the action, or news footage, or talking heads talking about the events that are taking place. In the beginning of the movie the documentary style serves the story well. We get our back story without any clunky dialogue, we’re introduced to characters in a way that makes them seem very real and natural, but by the end of the movie that all seems to fall apart. The interview segments and security camera shots no longer serve a purpose other than as a distraction, save maybe for the very end of the movie where they provide a nice capper to the climax. Ultimately, I thought the first half of the movie seemed to drag in parts, and a lot of the more comical aspects of the main character didn’t seem to fit with the tone of the film.

The premise is probably the strongest aspect of the movie. It’s Alien Nation, only much darker. Instead of the aliens assimilating into human society, they’re segregated and exploited. The Prawns, as the aliens are called, occupy a slum called District 9, where they’ve been relegated to trading their advanced alien weaponry (which is useless to humans, who are unable to operate it) to the Nigerian mob for cat food.

Our protagonist is Wikus Van De Merwe, a pencil pusher with the MNU who happens to have the unlucky distinction of being the boss’s son-in-law. Wikus is put in charge of the project to evict that aliens from District 9 and move them to the new District 10, far outside of Johannesburg. It’s clear from almost the beginning that he is in over his head, and as he blunders from one eviction to the next in District 9, he becomes exposed to an alien liquid that begins to change him into a Prawn. It’s then that he discovers two things. The MNU are conducting some pretty shady experiments on the Prawns, and his life isn’t worth spit to anyone but himself.

Wikus is a character that one would expect to find on “The Office”, not in an action movie. And it’s that juxtaposition that drives the movie, as this less than average guy finds himself in one untenable situation after another and is forced to make compromises that he never would have previously thought himself capable of. At first, to get his life back, and then finally, to do what’s right, knowing that he will probably never have his life back. Wikus isn’t a smart man, he isn’t even a very good man, but in the end he finds himself an unlikely hero, in a world that considers him a traitor, in a body that is not his own.

Even though I think the movie dragged and lost its tone at times, I think it succeeds in telling an unusual story in an interesting way.

My Netflix Rating: Three out of Five Stars