Camerana

There have been many pretenders to the throne, but in District 9, director Neill Blomkamp becomes the new James Cameron.

Along with Lucas and Spielberg, Cameron led the blockbuster vanguard in the eighties, producing both highly commercial and highly individual films. The writer/director wedded trashy boys’ stories (aliens, robots, sea monsters and spies) to forward-thinking themes that just enhanced his brash, entertaining chutzpah style (the strong female leads of Aliens and Terminator 2, the threat of nuclear war in The Terminator, through to the technological sea exploration of Titanic and The Abyss).

Although this highbrow-meets-lowbrow style influence can still be felt by fanboy directors such as the Wachowskis (The Matrix movies: CGI versus Eastern mysticism) and J.J Abrams (Lost: an island adventure versus existentialism), nobody has seemed to create this same unpretentious, tongue in cheek work since Cameron. Lost’s engimatic schtick has grown tired quite quickly, with Abrams turning to work on remakes and sequels, whilst the Wachowski’s have failed to live up to their promise.

In District 9, an alien spaceship comes to stand above ‘80s Johannesburg. After disembarking, the aliens are reluctantly herded into the segregated ‘District 9’. Cut to the modern day, and District 9 is a hotbed of corruption and crime, complete with gang culture and inter-species prostitution. The government decide to turf the aliens out and start again, in ‘District 10’. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is in charge of this operation, however when down in the district, he gets infected by a mysterious fluid, and begins to transform into one of the aliens.

District 9 is a film made by someone steeped in a certain tradition; it’s as dedicated to it as Cameron was dedicated to his pulp fiction (the robots, sea monsters etc), his b-movies (he did, after all, start his career on the set of Piranha 2) and his love of the spectacular ‘70s disaster movies which helped inform the overblown set pieces of later efforts Titanic and True Lies. District 9 is clearly filmed by someone who grew up watching James Cameron movies, and other classic sci-fi of the late ‘70s and ‘80s. There are many of these reference points; there is David Cronenberg-like body horror as Wikus begins his transformation (most specifically, The Fly), a cutesy alien child (E.T.) and the examination of the relationship between humans and aliens (V., Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

It only falters when Blomkamp strays from this; as a successor to Cloverfield (its most stylistically similar contemporary). The film begins in faux-documentary style-- talking heads, direct addresses to the audience, emphasis on following its subjects around-- however, as soon as the action starts this approach is abandoned. Although this means proceeds are more audience friendly than Cloverfield, which at times induced motion sickness, the consequence is that the tone is inconsistent, albeit uncluttered.

Thankfully, like a Cameron film on speed, the material is rich in compensation. Commentators have already commented on the Apartheid similarities, such as segregation and forced removals. If anything, Apartheid is used as a jumping-off point; although images from the alien ghetto are reminiscent of this, District 9 equally brings to mind the early days of the Holocaust and the escalating pogroms of the Jewish ghetto. There are clear parallels between the human experimentation on the aliens to that of Joseph Mengeles.

Ultimately, the film is concerned with human selfishness and defensiveness, something typified by the central character. Throughout, Wikius makes self-serving decisions that backfire or fail. There’s a crucial one in the second half, in which his self-serving thought process is astounding. Yet these decisions are entirely in keeping with this defensive, suspicious society that denies these aliens equal rights.

District 9 also possesses plenty of offbeat humour, similar to Cameron’s back catalogue. There are some gung-ho (yet also quite blackly comic) laughs from exploding aliens; humour that could have come out of Aliens. However, there are also more uncomfortable laughs present; the central character’s bumbling, awkward incompetence produces Gervais-like cringe comic moments. Uncomfortable or not, all of this humour goes with deflating an otherwise potentially portentous atmosphere.

The uncomfortable nature is one of the differences from a Cameron film. The movie presents quite a misanthropic vision, and, in this way, another contrast to JC. In Cameron’s world, evil comes from an Icarus complex; Titanic sinks because it is too ambitious a project, and the machines take over in the Terminator films because people have created too much too soon. In Blomkamp’s world it comes from people themselves; the aliens seem to be the (mostly) innocent party.

However, as with JC’s The Terminator, Blomkamp has given us a low-budget spectacle which is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Funny, scary, sad, original, exciting and spectacular: who needs Avatar?