District Nine

The story is fascinating … but the film fails the story!

Frankly, Enemy Mine (1985) did it better, because it did it on a smaller scale.

Peter Jackson’s latest effort, perhaps unconsciously driven by the vistas of “Lord of the Rings” and his stellar reputation, tries to be too big.

It’s hard for me to put into words – as if it were a bowl of vegetable beef soup, with all the right ingredients, but no salt, no seasoning – bland, tasteless. I don’t know what’s missing, but it left me rather cold. It was fascinating to watch, to be sure, but the technique, I think, that of “documentary” – with folks looking right into the camera at times, as they go about the work at hand – never engaged me. In other words, I didn’t care about characters, though the story is clearly a powerful tale of discrimination and we treat “aliens.”

Special effects are astounding, music is terrific, and Sharlto Copley (Wikus Van De Merwe), the “star” (in quotes, because here’s a man who effectively portrays a bureaucrat put into a high-powered position because of his influential father-in-law) is incredibly effective. He’s the perfect nerd trying to be tough, evicting the aliens from District Nine, the classic wimp backed up by guns, to be relocated some 200 miles further away from Johannesburg.

The aliens have been there for 20 years, sequestered, as in Apartheid, after their ship was disabled and they sought refuge here. These intelligent aliens, to our eyes, strange, if not repulsive, are relegated to a slum, and there they live, barely surviving, some of whom are subject to bizarre medical experiments and constant harassment.

During the eviction process, Wikus is exposed to a strange bio-fluid that’s taken years for an alien to create with cobbled parts and old computers – as it turns out, it’s the needed fuel to fire up the command module long buried beneath the slums, to return to the mother ship hovering and unmoving over Johannesburg from the day it arrived.

Within hours, Wikus begins to develop extreme symptoms – apparently alien DNA in the fluid is transforming him into an alien, first growing a hand that can fire alien weapons, a feat that weapons’ developers had been trying to accomplish for 20 years. In other words, Wikus is now worth billions.

But in a feat of strength, he escapes and flees to District Nine.

I won’t tell you the rest of the story – yes, the movie is worth seeing – as the story unfolds, we see what happens when race turns on race – hatred and fear, exploitation and black-marketing, and, as always, it’s the children who suffer.

A story for our times, indeed, but the film fails to deliver the requisite emotion, tension, hope and fear, that such stories inherently hold.