Oscar Review #2 - District 9

(Disclaimer: If you haven’t seen this movie, there may be information in this review that might be considered a “spoiler” - although I consciously try not to put major spoiler info in my reviews. Proceed with caution.)

For my second Oscar nominee viewing, I chose – well, Netflix sent – District 9. I only vaguely recalled the commercials for this and I thought there were aliens involved, but other than that, I didn’t know much else. However, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, it was the “Craziest F%&$ing Thing I’ve Ever Seen.”

First, the premise. About twenty years ago, an alien ship comes and stops over Johannesburg (think Independence Day), and just sits there. After some time, the humans have to break into it and inside they find severely malnourished aliens. The ship had lost its command module so they couldn’t go anywhere or, I suppose, even leave the ship. The aliens are moved to a detention area in Johannesburg – the titular District 9. So time passes and District 9 becomes a violent, filthy slum (think Slumdog Millionaire) and the government hires a company, MNU, to go into District 9 and evict the aliens and move them to District 10, an area about 200 miles outside of Johannesburg. Needless to say, hilarity ensues! J

The film starts out in a documentary-esque format, obviously from the hindsight point of view, with talking heads commenting on the events from their comfy offices. The documentary follows Wikus van der Merwe (that’s what I’m going to name my first child, BTW), as he leads the group of humans into the District 9 to evict the “Prawns.” While inspecting the shack of one of the Prawns, Wikus finds and accidentally squirts a strange, inky black liquid in his face. Subsequently, he gets sick and starts turning into a Prawn (think The Fly) and he is taken into the custody of either MNU or the government, it was hard to tell, and they perform all sorts of medical experiments on him and discover that his DNA is merging with the Prawn DNA which allows him to use Prawn technology, specifically weapons and machines.

When the doctor prepares to hack off Wikus’ arm/flipper, Wikus makes a run for it and finds safety with a Prawn, Christopher Johnson, and his son. While hiding out, Wikus discovers that Johnson and his son have been searching for, and actually found, the lost command module from the ship that still sits above Johannesburg and that the mysterious liquid was a fuel of some sort to allow the thing to work. They get the command module working and there is a HUGE battle during which Wikus fights off the “bad guys” from MNU to allow Johnson and his son to reunite the module with the mother ship. At one point during this battle, I took my eyes away from the screen for just a minute and next thing I know, Wikus is roaming around in this Transformers/Iron Man type suit shooting the bad guys. I have NO idea where that came from.

But Johnson and his son are able to reunite with the mother ship (think E.T.) and fly home, presumably to round up troops and bring them back here to whoop earthling butt for putting their people through 20 years of slumdum.

Ok, having basically just given you the entire plot of this movie, I apologize if I spoiled any surprises for you. Rest assured, there is still plenty of stuff that I didn’t tell, so…

I have several observations about this movie. First, and in no particular order, it was directed by Peter Jackson of the Lord of the Rings fame. Having seen all of the LOTR movies, I can only ask what was this guy smoking to want to make this movie?? I didn’t expect to see Hobbits, but I was expecting a good ol’Independence Day type of movie – that was not what I got. I should have known better than to think that that type of movie would have been nominated for Best Picture. Duh! Rose.

Observation #2 – back to this being the “Craziest F%&$ing Thing I’ve Ever Seen” – I thought that “In Bruges” had the most f-words in it, but then I saw this movie. If they bleeped all of the f-words in this movie, the end result would sound like some new age weird techno-pop type music. With the one exception of a (relatively) tender phone call between Wikus and his wife, I can’t recall a single sentence that didn’t contain at least one f-word. In fact, after a while, I was thinking that if I could stomach watching the whole thing again (which I could not), I would attempt to count them.

Observation #3 – it may have been on purpose, I don’t know, but as I jokingly alluded to in my summary of the plot, it seemed like this movie couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. First, a documentary, next a shoot’em up. I saw it described as a “thriller” in a magazine.

There must be something to this movie that I missed because I can’t see WHY it was nominated for anything other than special effects. So having said all of this, I did not enjoy this movie. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve sat through, but I’m glad I didn’t pay to go see it at the theater (technically, I didn’t pay anything, it’s mom’s Netflix account.) I just don’t see this winning the Best Picture.