First things first: the opening act of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a thing of beauty. The faux-documentary talking heads, the alien refugees captured with 90s-news-video stylings, the alien ship that’s only half-visible, hanging silently over Johannesburg – these images put you inside the world of the film with startling economy. I settled back in my seat, ready to be wowed.
As the final credits rolled, though, I was lacking in wow. The question is: was that the film’s fault, or my own?
District 9 is a clever, well-done, and genuinely entertaining movie. It’s been described as “the world’s first autobiographical alien apartheid movie” by Chris Lee in the LA Times. Writer / director Blomkamp talks about growing up in Johannesburg with the white minority of the population in power, and how this inspired the movie:
“Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go. [...] Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.”
It was quotes like this that led me expect some kind of metaphor-laden, socio-political apartheid tale. District 9 provides exactly that for the first half an hour or so – until its fairly standard sci-fi plot cranks into motion. Afterwards, these more unusual elements just become high-concept hooks for all the usual stuff: everyman versus evil corporate machinations, a magic MacGuffin for the heroes to quest after, and kaboomy video game shooter sequences.
(These action scenes, however, are great. They’re excitingly comprehensible in a way that cinema’s current Emperor of Explosions, Michael Bay, has sadly long forgotten.)
The alien civilisation we see is disappointingly shallow: sure, we meet Christopher – the Good and Wise Alien – but the rest of the occupants seem to be the same brainless scavengers that the government propagandists say they are. I just wanted a smattering of hints to tell me that they have… community leaders? Religious meetings? Games that the children play? Anything?
As a film critic, you’re meant to be immune to hype; it’s your professional obligation to accept a movie for what it is and nothing more. Of course that’s a filthy, filthy lie. Critics absorb just as much pre-film expectation as anyone else, and the entering with the wrong expectations can destroy a movie. If you see one thing written on the label but find something else inside the box? It’s easy to feel disappointed.
Ang Lee’s underappreciated non-blockbuster Hulk (2003) is a good example of this. It was advertised as a Hulk-smash!-style extravaganza… and turned out to be a bizarre, visually experimental psychodrama about fathers, sons, and abuse. The 10-year-old Hulk fans in my screening were so angry that they would’ve turned green and trashed the cinema if they could, believe me.
But was my wow-lack in District 9 the equivalent of complaining that, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses sucked because it didn’t have any ninjas? Maybe it is. Ulysses was never going to have ninjas. District 9 was always going to be the film it is, and not the film I wanted it to be.
I have a feeling I’ll enjoy District 9 more the second time around with my expectations suitably reset. In the end, though, it feels less political than Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers (1997) – even though the latter’s bite was buried under all that soap opera beefcake and unflinching irony.
(A final admission: I’ve never read Ulysses, and man, I’m going to be so very embarrassed if it does have ninjas in it.)