District 9

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Whether it’s diving into black holes or travelling through time, great science fiction grounds itself in something real enough to move its audiences and unreal enough to thrill them. By that standard, District 9 — a feature-length version of director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp’s short Alive in Joberg — is a brilliant success. Visually striking, disturbingly familiar and driven by a surprising undercurrent of action that culminates in something as wild as a giant suit of armour catching anti-tank missiles, the stand-in for Peter Jackon’s promised Halo movie is smart sci-fi that doesn’t skimp on the essentials.

Like Alive in Joberg, District 9 imagines a world where first contact with an alien species has gone from an historic moment to a ghettoized disaster. With a kilometre-long mothership permanently hovering over Johannesburg, the “Prawns” — a derogatory term for the aliens — have been fenced into squalid shacks whose security is administered by the Machiavellian MNU (Multi-National United) corporation.

At the movie’s centre is Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a well-meaning bureaucrat who finds himself unexpectedly leading a drive to move the titular district away from Johannesburg. Copley’s Wikus is The Office’s Michael Scott in a world of institutional weirdness, a man radiating wide-eyed glee for a job that includes aborting alien fetuses in a squishy grow-op and uncovering Prawn weapon caches while exclaiming, “This is a real find!” He’s a boob put through an increasingly punishing gauntlet and an alien fluid capable of causing mutations is only the beginning of his troubles.

While District 9 shares some of the documentary-style framing of Alive in Joberg, these segments serve mainly as bookends for the film’s first and final acts. The dread of an unnamed incident concerning Wikus is built up among friends and family members before the movie descends into the hell on the ground — experienced by both Wikus and a particularly sharp (and paternal) Prawn named Christopher. Chaos reigns in that quagmire and it’s only with a final attempt from the uninvolved to make sense of the affair that the documentary voices return in force.

With an evil corporation and a plucky pair of aliens who just want to go home, District 9 certainly owes some of its plotting to sci-fi’s tried-and-true conventions. Its real brilliance, then, comes from its ability to draw pathos from its characters and commentary on topics as germane as fear and the violence it often produces. The brutality of fear finds its most violent expression in a xenophobic mercenary colonel, whose unchecked forces bear a striking resemblance to the American Blackwater troops. Africa’s tin pot dictators also appear in the form of a group of Nigerian gangsters determined to make alien weapons theirs.

With energy-beams weapons capable of popping humans like bloody grapes or collapsing their buildings in showers of lightning, Blomkamps has fashioned a world whose extremes serve to focus its social targets while simultaneously providing the thrill of the unreal. It’s an amazing balancing act and the result is consummate, artful science fiction.