“Avatar” may be the biggest, most eye-popping sci-fi film of 2009, but it’s not the best. Or the boldest. That crown belongs to “District 9,” a low-budget genre masher that outpaces James Cameron’s epic on every front -- writing, acting, brains, brawn and infection -- that really matters to a true cinephile. By infection, I mean this South African-made film got in my blood system and hasn't left. It’s also a razor sharp satire on politics, racism and society, without being obnoxious.
Produced by Peter Jackson and directed by newcomer Neill Blomkamp, “District 9” is set on an alternate Earth in which a massive alien ship entered South African airspace and hovered over Johannesburg in 1982. It has stayed stranded there ever since, with its alien passengers left to live in openly fetid anarchistic slums. The presence of these aliens, which resemble Greedo from “Star Wars” meshed with a lobster, upended Apartheid's bloody era by giving black Africans and ruling white invaders new ground in which to bond: Hatred and oppression of the visitors.
Our lead character is a xenophobic Haliburton-type, right-wing-patsy company man named Wikus (newcomer Sharlto Copley), who dearly loves his wife, but giggles happily as he watches and listens to alien eggs burn. (He likens the sounds of abortion-by-fire to cooking popcorn.) A pathetic, vest-wearing nerd, Wilkus is charged with clearing the city’s alien slums, thus shipping the residents to a countryside camp, not unlike a Nazi mantra. But something gets in his blood system … and the movie blasts off in a 100 directions.
Told in a mixture of faux documentary interviews inter-cut with straight forward movie narrative, “District 9” is staggering in its suspense and the character arch of Wikus. It’s also a treat after “Avatar” (despite my liking it quite well), to see special-effects treated as haphazard: The ship hovering over the city is just part of the landscape, a common site to every one on screen.
But it’s the satire here that really sells: Dig the interview scene where a woman speaks about the "evil" visitors: “They’ll take your shoes right off your feet” and “kill you” without a thought, she claims. As she speaks, a nearby alien desperately and hopelessly scrambles through a dumpster in search of food. The kicker: The woman is a poor black. Not a rich snooty European. That’s film-making with balls, not to mention the second smart blockbuster of the summer to re-do history (the other is "Inglourious Basterds").
It’s wild that a sci-fi film made halfway around the world, with no American actors and mostly in subtitles, can remind us that this genre is at its most glorious when it’s not just tickling our eyes and ears, but striking at our hearts and minds. But, I’ll take it. A
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