Lower Decks

This is one of those things where you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard of. But, seeing that Lower Decks has not yet made official mention of it, I’m here to tell you that you’ve got to visit ‘District 9.’

Simply put, ‘District 9’ is an astonishing revelation, and yes, that’s probably what you’ve heard a thousand times over by now, but it bears repeating. From South African director Neill Blomkamp, set in his homeland and starring his countryman (and good friend) Sharlto Copley, the movie is so far from the average blockbuster map, its origin needs to be explained every time it’s talked about. Blomkamp had originally been enlisted by Peter Jackson to adapt the popular ‘Halo’ videogame series into a feature film, but when that fell through, Jackson had the idea to suggest that Neill expand on a short film he’d made years earlier instead. The rest, as its frequently said, is history.

‘District 9’ tells the rather unusual story of an alien spacecraft coming to Earth, and not only arriving at the most unexpected destination of Johannesburg, but just sitting there in orbit. Eventually, its residents are relocated to District 9, where bureaucrats eventually decide they must be removed from. Much of the film is presented as a documentary that makes all of this fairly matter-of-fact, and Copley’s character is introduced as the paper-pusher who gets the task of evicting the Prawns, as the aliens have come to be called (even though in the decades since all this began, it apparently became fairly easy for humans and aliens to understand their mutually exclusive languages), an office man far from the typical action figure mold, who shows no fear only because all of this is just business to him. When he stumbles upon the results of a long-standing project by one of the Prawns, however, everything changes.

The most obvious result is that Copley’s character finds himself with a hand that has suddenly been transformed into a Prawn’s appendage, which is significance because it closes one of the gaps that remains between the two species. Humans can’t use Prawn weapons because they’ve been genetically signatured to only work in the hand of a Prawn. Mindless agents quickly realize the advantage, just as the audience learns how important that project was to the Prawn. As Copley’s character struggles free, escaping another in a series of gruesome workshopping, he reunites with the Prawn, who has the command vessel that will get the alien ship moving again, and could potentially fix everyone’s problems.

A lot of this has been seen before, whether on film (much of the action scenes aren’t so different, say, from this summer’s own ‘Terminator: Salvation’) or on various anthology TV series, but taken as a whole and presented as even a surprise blockbuster, it’s somewhat wildly new, nail-biting and unpredictable to the end (which, in its way, is not all that dissimilar to last summer’s equally innovative ‘Hancock’). There are a lot of implications that make for an entirely unique experience, however.

For a lot of moviegoers, any experience that doesn’t heavily involve Americans or English-speaking peoples is as foreign as a foreign-language film. Much of this film is in English, but not from any typical vantage point. Critics have enjoyed pointing out the allegorical nature of this South African experience, from the land of Apartheid and Nelson Mandela, but as the film progresses, it becomes less and less easy to see it in such simple terms. Eventually, you find yourself thinking a lot more about the more obvious circumstance, that this is set in anything but a traditional location for this kind of experience. You find yourself wondering how this would play out somewhere else, if that ship did end up in a more traditional setting.

The hero would be a lot different than Sharlto Copley, and that is to take nothing from the amazing journey of his character. The last time a story of comparable profile stormed theaters, it was family man Tom Cruise (I confess, I still haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s ‘War of the Worlds,’ or any other incarnation; though I own a CD of the famous Orson Welles radio performance). ‘Independence Day’ certainly played out a lot differently, of course, and in ‘Men in Black,’ Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones might be said to carry on interspecies relationships in a similarly casual way as Copley, but again, with vastly different results. ‘District 9’ becomes as much a rousing adventure as a cultural study, whose implications maybe haven’t been thought all the way through. It is certainly unforgettable.