District 9 - PRAWN STEW ANYONE?

I was so excited about this movie that I ran out on the opening day to go and see it. Now, usually when I go to the movies the audience is South African and the film American, but today it was a South African movie with an American audience. That alone was enough to do my head in. Besides for that, I KNOW SOME OF THEM FOLK IN THAT FILM! The strangeness can't be explained.

Furthermore, I was referred to as an Alien the day before going to see this movie (when I went to open a bank account) and it kinda stuck with me. I'm an alien in America, watching a movie about aliens living in a township in SA... Can someone please switch the light on in this rabbit hole???

To top it off, it's a sci-fi-skop-skiet-en-donder, fueled by director Peter Jackson of "Lord of the Rings" fame's producing skills. The whole concept is hard to even think about. Where have you ever seen a sci-fi movie set in SA before? NEVER I tell you. Until today. And, I'm sad to say, in my humble opinion it should have stayed that way.

Now before I continue, let it be known that this movie is getting rave reviews over here. It was referred to as "the art house version of Independance Day" and got an 88% on the rotten tomatoes website. Which is high. It must make a difference when you don't really have a reference for SA like I do, because I thought it was absolute hilarity. However, the movie has stayed with me over the last 24 hours. But just because it managed to traumatise me doesn't make it a good film.

If you would like to get an idea of what it's all about, go watch the trailor on Youtube, or you can watch the original short film that Blomkamp based the movie on, also on Youtube. It's called "Alive in Joberg".

I thought the actor who played the lead was great. For an absolute nobody (he might not be but I've never heard of him) Sharlto Copley did an excellent job. Even if he was playing the most stereotypical white South African male you could possibly imagine. Oh the horror. Even the bad guy (that evil oke called Kobus) was very well cast and snarled really nicely. Still. It's one of those movies that make you cringe to be South African.

District 9 tells the story of Wikus van der Merwe (original...) who goes from zero to hero after accidently spraying some goo found in an alien township in his face. The goo starts to turn him into an alien (also called Prawns) and subsequently various people are after him for various reasons. It becomes an epic tale of survival and escape for him and his new Alien buddy, Christoper, filled with blood, guts and shoot-outs gallore. The film is raw in the most blunt sense of the word: dissected alien bodies in labs, slabs of cow given to the aliens to eat, their eggs also attached to cow parts and the lead character spends most of the movie with a very raw arm that gets progressively more bloody and infected. The shoot-out scenes are theatrically violent, with people popping into bloody splats after being shot with alien weaponry. Most of it is shot as a mockumentary, complete with shaky cameras et al. You have to have a strong stomach to sit through this movie.

The Aliens are refugees in South Africa, live in townships and love cat food. That's right. They love cat food and will do almost anything for it. So the Nigerians are selling it to them for large amounts of cash blah blah blah. I kept looking round me in the theater to see if anyone else thought it was utterly hilarious, but they all seemed to be looking rather serious.

The script is unrefined and coarse and the film is indulgent. It made me feel like someone had skim-read a history of SA, taken all the worst and contentious parts of it (apartheid, townships, poverty, desperation, conservative whites, segregation, muti murder etc etc) thrown it in a pot, mixed in a drop of sci-fi and a can of catfood and Bob's your uncle: District 9! But hold onto your seats people, there's more! They are planning a sequel to District 9 in the near future...

So maybe I'm supposed to just think of it as fiction, as a sci-fi movie. Maybe I'm supposed to not get so emotionally involved, but I AM. I'm in a foreign country having mixed emotions about the place I call home and I left that theater feeling like someone had thrown cold water in my face. There wasn't a single good or nice thing about SA in it. It capitalised on the violence and segregation that has been part of the fabric of SA for so long, and it depressed me no end.

Maybe if the director had seen the humor in what he was doing and sent it up it could have worked as a kitsch sci-fi comedy. But he didn't.

If you want to feel the happy, don't do it people.

Stay far away.