- UK release: September 2009
- Director: Neill Blomkamp · Writers: Neill Blomkamp; Terri Tatchell
- Studio / distributor: TriStar Pictures; WingNut Films; QED International
- Genre: Science fiction action thriller / social allegory · Runtime: 112 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe; Jason Cope as Christopher Johnson; David James as Koobus Venter; Vanessa Haywood as Tania van de Merwe
- IMDb: 7.9 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 90% critics / 82% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
This is the film Peter Jackson made instead of Halo. When that video-game adaptation collapsed, Jackson handed his unknown South African collaborator, Neill Blomkamp, a reported thirty million dollars and told him to go and make something of his own. What Blomkamp made is a science fiction film that does what the genre keeps promising and rarely delivers: it uses the aliens to talk about us. The mothership hangs over Johannesburg rather than New York or London, and that choice of city does most of the heavy lifting. A film about a segregated, fenced-off underclass, shot in the country that invented the word apartheid, was never going to be subtle. It does not need to be.
The setup
Twenty years ago an alien ship drifted to a halt over Johannesburg and then simply stopped, its million-odd occupants malnourished and leaderless inside. Two decades on, the survivors are penned into a slum called District 9, despised by the locals, called “prawns” as a slur, and policed by a private contractor, Multinational United, whose real interest is the alien weaponry it cannot work out how to fire. Wikus van de Merwe, a mid-level MNU functionary, is put in charge of serving eviction notices ahead of a forced relocation. Somewhere in a District 9 shack he is exposed to a canister of alien fluid, and from that point the film stops being about the prawns and starts being about what his own employers are willing to do to him.
The cast
Sharlto Copley had never acted before this, and you would not guess it. His Wikus begins as a grinning, paper-shuffling company man, the sort who films himself handing out eviction papers and chuckles at his own jokes, and Copley lets you watch that smugness curdle into terror and then something close to grace. It is a brave performance precisely because Wikus is not likeable; he is a small, complicit cog, and the film makes you follow him anyway. Jason Cope gives the alien Christopher Johnson, rendered through effects, a quiet paternal dignity that quietly shames every human in the frame. David James plays the MNU mercenary Koobus Venter as pure, unbothered brutality, the apartheid-era enforcer reborn in body armour. Vanessa Haywood, as Wikus’s wife Tania, anchors the small domestic stakes that keep his ordeal from being merely a chase.
The craft
Blomkamp opens in full mockumentary mode: talking heads, news inserts, CCTV, handheld surveillance footage, all assembled as though after the fact. It should not hold for nearly two hours, and the seams do show when the format quietly drops away for conventional action in the second half. What carries it is the texture. The District 9 township looks lived-in and filthy and real, the alien design is grimy and functional rather than sleek, and Trent Opaloch’s camera treats the prawns as documentary subjects rather than monsters. The effects work, from Jackson’s Weta shop, is extraordinary value for the budget and never preens. Clinton Shorter’s score leans on African vocals that give the carnage a mournful, rooted quality. The violence, when it lands, is sudden and wet and unglamorous.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is Alien Nation, which also dropped a stranded alien underclass into a real city, though Blomkamp is far angrier and far less interested in buddy-cop reassurance. The satirical streak, corporate ghouls, gleeful media, weapons that turn people inside out, is pure RoboCop, transplanted from Verhoeven’s Detroit to Blomkamp’s Johannesburg. And the grey, overcast, near-future grimness sits close to Children of Men, another film that makes science fiction feel like the evening news. Where Starship Troopers hid its politics behind a knowing wink, District 9 puts the allegory right on the fence posts and dares you to look away.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have taken to it strongly, sitting around 90%, with most of the praise going to the apartheid framing, the documentary nerve, and Copley. Audiences are a little cooler at 82%, and I suspect that gap is the second-half handbrake turn: viewers drawn by the ideas can feel the film trade its mockumentary intelligence for mech-suit shootouts. That tonal swerve is the one real flaw, and it is worth naming. But the action half is well staged and the ideas do not evaporate when the guns come out, so the join bothers me less than it bothers some.
Verdict
This is intelligent, furious, original science fiction made for a fraction of what the genre usually costs, and it understands that the most unsettling thing you can show an audience is not the alien but the bureaucrat with the clipboard. It loses a little of its documentary daring when it shifts into straight action, and Wikus is a hard man to spend two hours beside. Against that, it has a debut performance worth the ticket, a setting no other film would have dared, and the rare quality of leaving you arguing about it afterwards. It rewards a rewatch, because the early mockumentary section is denser than it first looks. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, on a 15 certificate. Worth catching on a big screen while the township still feels that close.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Blomkamp went on to make Elysium (2013) and Chappie (2015), both of which chase the same blend of grubby near-future texture and social allegory with diminishing returns, which has only sharpened the sense that District 9 caught lightning in a bottle. A long-promised sequel, District 10, has been talked about for years without materialising. The film is now widely available on Blu-ray, 4K disc and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for one use of very strong language and strong bloody violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are scenes of violence between aliens and humans, some of which include blood spurts and sight of characters exploding or having heads or limbs ripped off.
Threat and horror: There are scenes of threat, including when unarmed aliens are killed during weapons testing.
Language: There is frequent use of strong language (‘f**k’) and infrequent use of very strong language (‘c**t’).
Sex: There are some moderate sex references, including to ‘inter-species prostituition’ and to the use of condoms. There is no sight of sexual activity.
Injury detail: When a man mutates there is disturbing sight of changes to his body, including him vomitting blood and his finger nails falling out.
Disturbing images: Alien eggs are burned, causing the baby aliens to scream. This is referred to as ‘abortion’.
Alcohol and smoking: Adults drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
