District 9 (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. With Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt, Sylvaine Strike, and Elizabeth Mkandawie. (R)
For a day or two after watching District 9, I was torn about the film. On the one hand, it's an audacious and remarkably assured debut from Neill Blomkamp, the South Africa-born director whom Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) plucked from relative obscurity. Offered the financial backing to make a film of his choice, Blomkamp decided to remake his 2005 short Alive in Joburg, expanding a six-minute film to a feature length story about prejudice, inalienable rights and the longing to belong. On the other hand, the film, which in ways both subtle and overt is the story of South African apartheid—the title recalls the forced segregation of Cape Town's District 6—pulls much of its initial impact from the fact that the oppressed people in this alternate Johannesburg aren't people at all. They're aliens.
In this version of our history, the extraterrestrials and their massive mothership came to a halt in the skies above Johannesburg 20 years ago. Malnourished and lacking the fuel to return home, they are resettled on terra firma only to find themselves inhabiting a shantytown rife with violence and exploitation at the hands of Nigerian crime lords. The question is whether Blomkamp treats it as anything more than a gimmick. I think he does, and once you accept his initial premise, the sci-fi trappings of the film are largely secondary, simply giving a new slant to an old story. The important thing, as always, is only this: is it a story well told? It is.
When the film opens, the South African government is about to move almost two million "prawns"—the aliens resemble bipedal crawfish—to a new settlement far from Johannesburg. Leading the operation is desk jockey Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who eagerly leads a camera crew through the slum as he evicts alien families. Van De Merwe is no man's hero—at one point he torches a shack filled with alien embryo pods, then compares the sound of their exploding to popcorn popping—but he's not entirely evil, either. The trod-upon son-in-law of an important official, Van De Merwe is constantly trying to fit in, even when that means behaving horribly.
After he's exposed to a mysterious alien substance, Van De Merwe's life begins to change. Most notably, he begins to grow what appears to be a large lobster claw. Of more importance to his father-in-law is the revelation that Wikus' transformation provides a means of harnessing the aliens' powerful bio-technology weaponry. Suddenly, Wikus is on the other side of the fence: a prawn. On the run, not belonging wholly to either world, he finally finds hope in an alien with the unlikely, government-issued name of Christopher Johnson. Realizing that neither can achieve his goal without the other, the pair forge a shaky friendship.
As Wikus, Sharlto Copley is something of a find. The actor, whose only previous credit seems to be his friendship with the director (he did appear as a sniper in Alive in Joburg) carries District 9 with no real signs of trouble, despite having CGI characters for costars. What's more, he's able to make us care about a bootlicking bureaucrat, and—most important of all—believe in his transformation. If he decides to continue acting, he'll be well worth watching.
Shooting in a now familiar faux-documentary style, Blomkamp frames his story with news footage and talking head interviews with Van De Merwe's co-workers and family. It feels like an unnecessary if harmless conceit, though perhaps younger viewers less familiar with recent South African history will come away with something more: questions (maybe about Blomkamp's questionable portrayal of Nigerians as superstitious cannibals and whores), or some desire to see just how much of the story really happened to someone somewhere in Johannesburg. If so, it will have been worth it.
Also this week: Zero Hour Films drops into Northampton's Pleasant Street Theater on Saturday August 22 for a one-night-only screening of the 1980 Japanese bio-horror movie Virus. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, whose previous work includes the Oscar-winning Tora! Tora! Tora! and the controversial Lord of The Flies update Battle Royale, this epic end-of-humankind story was, at the time, the most expensive Japanese film ever made. (Perhaps not a giant claim when one considers the effects budgets of the Godzilla films.)
The international cast features Edward James Olmos and Robert "Call the law offices of Mark E. Salomone" Vaughn alongside Japanese icon Sonny Chiba as a few of the less than a thousand men and women who have survived a biological holocaust triggered by the release of a deadly virus during a plane crash. As the pandemic takes hold, the survivors, holed up in an Antarctic research station, search for an unlikely cure. Like all films in the Zero Hour series, Virus screens at midnight; the special admission price is three dollars.
Curiously, the two other new films at Pleasant Street and its sister house Amherst Cinema have Japanese ties. Ponyo, the latest animated fantasia from renowned director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away; Howl's Moving Castle), is a loose retelling of the Little Mermaid story that will surely give you more to think about than the earlier Disney adaptation. The Cove, meanwhile, is anything but a cartoon; the documentary expos? about dark doings in a Japanese fishing village is certain to spark outrage. (Both films will be reviewed next week.)
Walk a bit further up Main Street on Friday, and you'll find the Media Education Foundation playing host to a curious piece of cinema: Profit Motive and The Whispering Wind, a 58-minute "photographic poem" by John Gianvito, a media arts professor at Emerson College.
Spurred to action by his re-reading of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Gianvito's film is a meditative work with little overt explanation. The camera rests on grave markers and historical sites, and only as the film progresses does it become clear that Gianvito is tracing the history of our country's often conflicted relationship with its progressive past. In an interview with cinema-scope.com (which called the film a "lean, poetic, and rigorous" work that "leaves viewers awestruck"), the filmmaker discusses the challenge of transmitting a sense of that storied history without letting his work "veer too much toward PBS." Hence the deliberate lack of explanatory text or voiceover—it you feel that perhaps you should know more about some of the names you see onscreen, Gianvito seems to suggest you would do well to do your own homework.
