Revisiting ‘District 9’: A wasted opportunity
Is it time to reëxamine the narrative of Neill Blomkamp’s “one hit wonder”?
Since his Academy Award-nominated feature debut, Neill Blomkamp has locked himself in a downward critical spiral, seemingly attracting worse and worse reviews for each new film. Again and again, he aims high, tackling hot tech-political subjects such as AI autonomy, police militarization, transhuman body horror and exclusionist “utopias”. Armed to the teeth with an arsenal of, er… special effects, hand-held cameras, and exploding heads, Blomkamp entered into films such as Elysium and Chappie about as ill-equipped to handle his subject matter as a human is to fire Prawn weaponry. As a result, vapid political commentary is just one of the things audiences have come to expect from Blomkamp in later years—that and (quite ironically, given its focus) shoddy, overly-smoothed future-tech CGI, and unintelligible comic violence.
With the reviews for Demonic looking no better (I refuse to find out; not only am I not a masochist, but I’m also far too gore-averse to risk most modern horror films in cinema), it seems we are fast approaching the time when Blomkamp will be forever labelled a one-hit-wonder. But this interpretation doesn’t sit all that well with me. Is District 9 really so far ahead of Blomkamp’s other attempts that we ought to continue to latch on to it, despite Blomkamp’s best efforts to convince us of his shortcomings? Is modern cinema really so starved for good science fiction that we have to cling onto this one half-polished gem? (Well, yes, sort of—but, to name a few, Annihilation, Prospect and High Life are less popular sci-fi films from the past decade that are far more worthy of audiences attention.)
Everything for which Blomkamp is usually criticised—the cheap writing, the political myopia, the insufferable overacting of his actors—all begins in earnest with District 9. The first twenty or so minutes of the film are, to be fair to Blomkamp, reasonably well-constructed, and it is through this lens that the film’s main merits shine, casting an allegorical light onto South Africa’s historical Apartheid as learn the story of the Prawns’ arrival on earth. The opening act introduces all the characters we’d realistically expect to see amidst the budding alien Apartheid: from the well-meaning buffoons to the NIMBYs to the downright fascists, these are the characters who will inform the story when it kicks off in earnest. The writing is succinct and the satire, while humourless, pinpoints the bigotry and hypocrisy of the South African citizens forming the film’s backdrop. The “shaky cam” works fine with the found-footage feel of the opening sequence, and the one-note, archetypal characters work just fine given the constant historical parallels. It’s the sort of thing that feels like it might have been genuinely brilliant had the rest of the film been taken in another direction, perhaps handled by someone either more sensible or more humorous.
But then, unfortunately, the film does kick off in earnest. And what kind of film is it, exactly? Who knows. District 9 leaps from genre to genre: one moment a story about authoritarian oppression, the next a typical virus-exposure horror film, the next an action flick with an entire world (not ours, but nonetheless) at stake. What’s remarkable in all this is that not once after the opening sequence has ended does the film conjure a single line with any depth or nuance to it. All those genres, and yet not one of them managed to evoke any dialogue that gives any sense of the profound—or, at least, the sense of not being totally ham-fisted. Here, however, is a real line from the film: “I love watching you Prawns die.” Admittedly, lots of good dialogue sounds awful written down and out of context, but this example is far from misrepresentative of the general quality in District 9.
And even if half a line’s power is its performance, there’s nothing special in any of those. Blomkamp, it seems to date, is quite terrible at getting good performances out of his actors; they all speak like kids reading out lines from comic books — and even then, most actual comic book films manage to get better performances in. The other part of a director’s job is, of course, to make the film work on a visual level, and here Blomkamp is no better: District 9 is a weak film visually speaking. I don’t mean the CGI—despite the digs, I can tolerate bad CGI on a budget. But even putting that aside, the film looks horrible. The hand-held feel does nothing for the film’s narrative section. Unlike the Bourne trilogy, where shaky-cam felt like a part of the film’s choreography, here Blomkamp’s camera just feels lazy, like nobody could be bothered to fetch a tripod from the van. And every shot is either a close-up or a faux-journalistic long shot, like the work of a documentarian too afraid to get up close and personal with their subject.
Again, this works fine for the mockumentary sections — not so much for the actual narrative. It makes it feel like the hectic opening documentary scenes never end—but this tone is one at a mismatch with the story, which is a decidedly non-journalistic (i.e. it is truthful of in-world events) look at the story within District 9. (The film even makes a point, at the end, of stating that “no-one knows for sure” what happened there, and will happen afterwards.) But worse, this camerawork gives the film that awful, cheap action flick feel—a cheap action flick is exactly what the film is, of course, but it could at least pretend otherwise. Combined with the head-explodey, camera-splatty, blood-go-everywherey comic book violence, the action sequences themselves seem to be aiming quite deliberately in the opposite direction to the profundity that the subject matter surely deserves.
District 9 is far from the worst film in any of its many genres — it’s not even the worst 21st century film to be nominated to the Oscars — but its reputation has nonetheless far outgrown its actual quality. It irks me; it bothers a particular pet peeve of mine for films which occupy a niche in the popular consciousness, if you will, but do it poorly. Another good example of this would be I Am Legend — far from a bad film but, by excluding the twist of its source material that the protagonist was the unwitting villain, the adaptation denied the world the opportunity for a film that would bring this philosophical question to the genre. District 9, similarly, fails to say much of interest about the nature of revolutionary violence, or of violence within subjugated communities — both of which feature heavily in the film and deserved to have been treated with a bit more consideration.
