This Peter Jackson character sure has an eye for unearthing little-known talent.
From giving Oscar-winner Kate Winslet her first-ever feature role in Heavenly Creatures to casting a green Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings straight out of drama school, Jackson has never shied away from boldly relying on no-names.
When handed producing duties for the big-screen adaptation of the hugely popular video game series Halo, Jackson pegged unknown South African Neill Blomkamp to helm the grandiose blockbuster. When that film found its way onto the back burner, Jackson decided to instead back Blomkamp as the newcomer tackled a passion project called District 9.
By splicing poignant social commentary into a film that is equal parts compelling sci-fi thriller and heart-wrenching tragedy, Blomkamp has not let Jackson’s good faith down, emerging from obscurity to give us a movie that will surely be recognized as one of the year’s best.
Having made a career out of working as a 3-D animator on shows such as Smallville and Dark Angel, Blomkamp directed just a handful of short films before taking the reins of District 9. The plot expands upon the 29-year-old’s fascinating 2005 short, Alive in Joburg, which takes place in a fictional setting in which extraterrestrial refugees have inhabited the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Even though the “prawns” have been immersed within human culture, the South African government has relegated them to the impoverished settings of District 9. That locale, consequentially, is a shady place where alien arms dealing and interspecies prostitution between the prawns and spiritual Nigerian outlaws has become common. Cleverly weaving faux documentary and traditional storytelling into a single narrative, Blomkamp almost immediately prompts a sheer state of appreciation for his inspired imagination.
The film delivers some heavy-handed perspective on South African apartheid, and one looking for a more timely tag could also apply the broad message to the modern American debate on illegal immigration. By using raw, gritty footage and an unrecognizable cast to treat the science-fiction genre with stark realism, Blomkamp has done what seems so painfully difficult in this day and age: craft a truly original picture. The breathtaking end result is quite unlike anything else that has graced the silver screen in recent memory.
At the center of the alien-human conflict is Wikus van der Merwe (filmmaker Sharlto Copley, a revelation in his first feature acting role), an overzealous field operative for company Multi-National United charged with evicting the prawns from District 9 and relocating them to the more isolated confines of District 10. When an all-too-close encounter with alien technology launches his body into a frightening alien mutation, Wikus suddenly becomes the most valuable – and therefore most hunted – man alive.
Blomkamp gives the film’s pacing a jolt with an intense action set piece in the second act before offering another stunning sequence at the movie’s climax. This should come as a refreshing break to anyone who recently had the misfortune of sitting through Michael Bay’s two-plus-hour romp of monotonous alien combat, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
With a modest $30 million budget (less than one-sixth of what Bay spent to make the Transformers sequel), Blomkamp has pieced together an exponentially superior film with more enthralling action, to boot. While Bay set his bar based on computer-generated size and scope, a rookie director has outdone him by banking on the human element of his story. Simply put, Blomkamp resists the urge to fall overly in love with his visual effects, as convincing as they are.
Therefore, Blomkamp not only drives District 9’s fight scenes forward with the considerable momentum of its gripping characters, but he also realizes watching a real person explode with a splatter of blood will always be more fun than seeing a pair of computer-generated robots rip each other apart.
One man who could very well be lost in the shuffle as the word gets out about District 9 is Copley. A longtime friend of Blomkamp’s who served as a producer on Alive in Joburg (he also gave a brief cameo in the short), Copley had to have been a risky choice for the lead part. But he more than holds his own while taking on a role as physically demanding as it is emotionally trying, and his layered performance is largely what holds the film together.
Although Jackson didn’t direct this movie, one could very well believe he did. In fact, District 9 feels like a combination of the mid-’90s Jackson’s affinity for bloody slasher flicks with the turn-of-the-century Jackson’s slant toward more ambitious cinema.
As District 9 wraps up, Blomkamp leaves his audience with a beautifully poetic final shot that, as ambiguous as it is, could not have made for a better ending. After seeing Blomkamp make all the right moves in his first feature effort from beginning to end, Jackson can officially take credit for successfully finding yet another diamond in the rough.
tfloyd1@umdbk.com
RATING: 4.5 stars out of 5
