LOVING THE ALIENS

MOVIE
District 9
Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope
Director Neill Blomkamp
Review Ray Chan

It may be regarded as just a South African sci-fi B-movie, but make no mistake, District 9 punches well above its weight, even as it takes its inspiration from major-league precedents.
    Writer-director Neill Blomkamp turns the stock idea of alien incursions on its head, in which visitors from another world, instead of launching hostile attacks, are stranded and have to be relieved from their stricken craft and assimilated and domiciled on Earth.
   By human standards, they an unsightly race of crustacean-type bipeds – their derogatory nickname is "prawns" – forcing them to be herded away into a refugee camp known as District 9, where they are treated as lower class citizens.
    Over the years, the stranded aliens breed among themselves, leading to a mass concentration of the beings within what has turned into a slum township.
    The turning point of the movie occurs when the authorities contract a private company, MNU, to evict the aliens from the bug bivouac and relocate them to a concentration camp.
    In charge of this operation is a despotic field worker, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who fails to take precautions during the evacuation, gets infected with DNA from the aliens, and eventually becomes one himself.
    Once the conversion is complete, Wikus is unrecognisable to his peers, and forced to live his life in the same decrepit fashion he forced thousands of aliens to endure.
    The historical allegory of District 9 can’t be ignored and sticks out like a sore thumb. Nobody actually mentions the word "apartheid", but the resonances abound.
    Caught between the armies that break into their houses and an underworld of Nigerian gangsters who exploit them, the aliens face a system of oppression that inevitably calls to mind the cruelties of the South African police state.
    What transpires then takes the plot into the realm of nightmare: a hush-hush genetic experimentation program from which MNU will adapt the aliens' more powerful weaponry to their own use.
    Wikus’ tale is particularly tragic. Initially a nerdy bureaucrat playing up to the TV cameras as though he were the star of his own docudrama, he only got the job because his father-in-law heads MNU.
    Wikus's infection takes him through terror, despair and, finally, to resistance, as he joins forces with an alien scientist whose long-term plan has been to get back to the mothership.
    What's surprising is the way Copley's performance as Wikus grows on the viewer; the thoroughly unlikeable office twit is turned by his ordeal into a creature of pathos, managing this even while mutating into an oversized arthropod.