Blair Witch Meets Alien Prawns
August 17th, 2009, 5 Comments »
On the weekend I watched District 9. In terms of pre-release buzz, creative marketing and a smallish budget ($30 million), it’s this summer’s “Blair Witch Project”. I’m still trying to reconcile how I feel about the movie, and how much I actually enjoyed it.
It’s a surprisingly difficult movie to categorize. It’s certainly a science-fiction movie. But it’s also, at various times, an obvious allegory for South African apartheid, a thriller, an action movie and, oddly, kind of a buddy flick. Director Neill Blomkamp (born in Johannesburg, but attended the Vancouver Film School and is still based here) draws on a lot of techniques from television news and documentaries. The first third of the film is constructed out of interviews and seen through the eyes of a camera crew following around the protagonist.
This technique, combined with effective CG work and naturalistic setting–the film was shot in Johannesburg’s sprawling slums, make for a really immersive experience. There’s a little of TV’s Battlestar Galactica in District 9, as well as some Starship Troopers and a dash of Hotel Rwanda.
The movie is Blomkamp’s and lead actor Sharlto Copley’s first feature-length film, and you feel that occasionally. The performances and writing are a bit broad in places, a bit simple. For example, I liked the way the humans referred to the immigrant aliens as ‘prawns’, with the same nonchalance that previous generations of white South Africans called blacks ‘kaffirs’. Yet the metaphor becomes overused and trite by the film’s climax. The whole film is a bit uneven–nuanced and clever one minute, clunky and obvious the next.
Still, it’s the most surprising and original film I’ve seen in months, and it has smart things to teach us about apartheid and the developing world. I’d definitely recommend it.