Wikus Van de Marwe’s very bad day.
Peter Jackson produces and Neill bloomkamp directs his first feature in this unconventional science fiction mockumentary/action film. I say unconventional because it doesn’t take place in the future (in fact it started 28 years ago), it doesn’t involve Americans (everyone here is South African), and it doesn’t feature the complete destruction of Manhattan. What it does feature is a little closer to home, a humanitarian crisis. That is if you could call such a crisis affecting the aliens in this movie, the Prawns, humanitarian. I suppose you would call it an extraterrestrian crisis…maybe.
28 years ago a large flying saucer stopped over the Johannesburg. To everyone’s amazement I’m sure, it didn’t completely vaporize the city with a hi-tech laser beam. It simply stopped there and waited. After much hesitation the humans decided to hack their way into the spaceship and see what was going on inside. What they found was about a million and a half desperate and starving Prawns huddled together. The Prawns were transported into District 9, a ghetto with severe poverty and high crime. After many protests by the natives the Aliens were completely quarantined from the outside world. In many ways it seemed called for as the Prawns are portrayed as animalistic, unclean, potentially dangerous and just plain ugly. As the movie starts the government has decided to hire a corporation to move the Prawns from their ghetto in Johannesburg to somewhere even worse fifty miles from Johannesburg. Technically forcing people to forsake all the possessions they have and kicking them out of their houses is illegal, but the humans don’t consider the Prawns as people, which they technically aren’t but you still get what this is trying to make you think about.
Heading the mission is Wikus Van de Marwe who is played by Sharlto Copley. Yeah I know, I have never heard of him too. According to IMDB he’s only had one previous role in a movie and that was as an unnamed sniper in 2005. He isn’t even famous in South Africa. This isn’t just his first lead role. It is literally his first role of any notable size. And what a role, this is not so much a trial by fire as it is a trial by hell-storm. He is in every single scene and spends most of his time interacting with CGI figures i.e. empty air. Not to mention the trials he goes through in this movie. He spends the first third of the movie evicting unruly aliens, a very inhospitable job. Then something rather unfortunate happens and he gets infected with a poison that somehow starts merging his DNA with Prawn DNA. To his horror he starts turning into the very species he was oppressing. Try explaining that one to your wife. The corporation he is working for decides to do something very capitalistic about his predicament. Try tests on him in the name of science. They are especially interested in his newfound ability to use the Prawn weapons, which before humans were unable to turn on or shoot. He spends the second third of the movie escaping from the evil corporation and being hunted down by the government as an outlaw (among other things he is wrongfully accused of catching a Prawn STD.) The last third of the movie is where the ‘action’ in ‘action movie’ comes in. He finds a Prawn that is not only in possession of a plan to save the Prawn species and cure Van de Marwe but also a very large cache of alien weapons. Lets just say from there on things get blowed up real good. And by ‘things’ I mean the corporate headquarters, the South African military, and a gang of cannibalistic Nigerian thugs. And by ‘blowed up real good’ I mean the ability of these Prawn weapons to disintegrate and explode a human at the same time. Actually now that I think of it, it was kind of disgusting but I have a feeling science fiction fans with love every minute of it. At one point Vikus finds a bulletproof robot suit that employs almost every kind of weapon imaginable. He tears ass through the ghetto with it destroying everything that gets in his way. I admit that was pretty cool.
The funny thing is that Vikus really starts out as a nice man. He’s actually a bit of dork. At the beginning his cheerfulness kind of took me off guard because of the amoral things his job was requiring him to do. But halfway through the movie I realized that it really was a necessity to make this character as optimistic as possible in the beginning because he is about to experience the worst couple days in his entire life. The amount of woe this movie piles on the guy is tremendous. If he had started out the movie as a grump or with a hangover he may have spontaneously combusted halfway through the movie due to an overwhelming load of bitterness, desperation, and frustration. Making him so dorky in the beginning allows the character to a lot more leeway in terms of arc. And still by the end he is stark raving mad and tearing through the ghetto in a robot suit destroying everything that gets in his way. The character progression is realistic though considering what he has been put through. I bet everyone at his office was completely taken aback by how such a nice man could kill so many people.
There are unmistakable political overtones to this movie as it is supposed to parallel South Africa’s experience with Apartheid, but like the best movies it doesn’t draw to much attention to it. In fact if a viewer is only interested in things getting blowed up real good, he can easily ignore whatever message the director was getting at. An understanding of apartheid is not a requisite to enjoying this movie.
One more I thing I happen to notice with these mockumentary films is that there invariably comes a time when we see something we shouldn’t see because the camera man really shouldn’t be there. I didn’t particularly catch when in this movie where the cameraman ceased being a character in the story that people would yell at to stop filming and became simply an omniscient dude that nobody ever notices. Doesn’t matter really, just something I noticed.
No comments:
Post a Comment