Spoiler Alert: This Post Reveals Plot Information about the Movie District 9

I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Neil Blomkamp's District 9 tonight. It was a powerful viewing experience, but the more I sift through my thoughts, the less satisfied I become.

The premise of the movie, a refugee alien population living in a South African slum, strikes me as an inherently big-canvas idea. Alien contact means a fundamental change for humanity across the globe. Yet somehow, between the Sixty Minutes reporting style through which the movie is told and the restricted setting (most action takes place within District 9 or MNU corporate headquarters), I felt pretty claustrophobic watching this film. This might have been an intentional effect, but I would have liked to have seen more footage from populations around the world when the mothership arrives, for example, rather than focusing on individual commentators so much. It's just a shame to miss these epic shots when the plot serves them up on a platter.

That said, I think the choice of primary setting was brilliant. It was refreshing to see a new culture enter the science fiction genre. The script resonates strongly with South Africa's apartheid history. Aliens are not welcome among the general population, and they are relegated to a shanty town, from which they will soon be evicted. All the races of South Africa agree that the aliens do not belong in their city, and public outcry forces the powers that be to perform a species cleansing, moving District 9's alien inhabitants to concentration camps. To my knowledge, this is the first major science fiction production ever set in South Africa. I felt that District 9 did a great job of transmuting the values of this culture so that the aliens embodied a distinctly South African metaphor.

The protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley), undergoes a fairly convincing version of the cowardly lion's story: a bureaucrat finds his courage. All the nuts and bolts are in place to see Wikus's slow physical transformation into an alien instigate a growth and change within him that makes him more human. Down to the final moment of choice in which the main character can either leave his alien comrade to die or stand and fight, key character moments are set up and knocked down by a team of writers, directors, and producers who clearly know the classic formulas for character development. Unfortunately, so much time was spent on grotesquery, explosions, and fire fights that there wasn't any left for that extra bit of character development that makes the formula of growth and change transcendent--so that you forget any formula is at work. No time was spent making the protagonist sympathetic or three-dimensional in the first half. Wikus is such a putz in the beginning of the movie that I didn't much care what happened to him by the end. I did, however, fall for the alien Christopher, who is smarter than Wikus and much more human a being, if you'll excuse the sapiens-centric handle.

Ultimately, what I mean by a big-canvas production is that this movie set out to paint an ambitious alternate reality. One of the main aspects of this world that I felt I missed out on, despite all the screen time spent in Johannesburg's District 9, was an understanding of the aliens' culture and story. I do detect some severe cutting in post-production, considering that the trailer shows interrogations with one of the aliens that imply the humans will not let them go home, and no such interrogations occurred in the film I saw tonight. It would have been important to me to see more interaction among the aliens and to understand more of the big picture about why they were near Earth, how their ship got stranded, how they were forced to stay, and the way they acted as a society, even in such desperate conditions. Even some key plot elements such as whether or not Wikus's girlfriend intentionally betrays his location are left ambiguous, in favor of an extended camp eviction scene at the beginning of the movie and a lot of flesh-rot and explosions toward the end.

I did enjoy District 9. I'd give it a six or seven on a scale of one to ten. The positive aspects include originality in treatment of aliens. Not even ET seemed so ordinary as these extraterrestrial interlopers. This has a lot to do with the amazing special effects that allowed the aliens' nuanced facial expressions and fluid movements. I enjoyed every second the aliens were onscreen; they seemed uncannily humanoid even as they looked completely other. The general relationship between oppressor and oppressed was also well rendered in District 9. Humans and aliens can understand one another's languages, they have been coexisting for so long; when the humans come around to serve eviction notices, the alien response is not fear so much as mild curiosity and disaffection. This was all very interesting. I just wish I could have gotten a little more information about these creatures' way of life as a community and a few less teeth and bodily fluids erupting from Wikus's body.

I sensed Peter Jackson's hand in some of the action and gore. There's no denying the man is true to his roots in zombie and horror flicks, whether he's producing or directing.