Rosenbush Cafe

Eviction Notice

Reviewed By Henry B. Rosenbush

In 1966, the apartheid government of Cape Town, South Africa declared the inner city District 6 as for ‘whites only’ area and over the years 60,000 citizens were forcibly removed 25 kilometers away to Cape Flats. Forty three years later, stranded aliens are about to be relocated from District 9 to the more remote District 10 in the profound and superior science fiction film that revisits apartheid and exposes the human race as the most inhuman and dangerous species in the universe.

Borrowing a few crucial key plot elements from other memorable science fiction films, Alien Nation, ET and Starman, South African director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a unique hybrid; its xenophobic subtext reveals the disturbing idiosyncrasy of earthlings: prejudiced, distrustful and mean-spirited towards one another and in the case of this film, a warped twist on illegal immigration with outer space aliens replacing their earthbound counterparts.

In an interesting reversal, black and white interviewees, under the guise of impressive faux newsreel footage display their disdain and outright hatred for the aliens they perceive to have “invaded” their country.

Whether the components are based on racial, gender or socio-economic intolerance the history of humankind are replete with slavery, class division and perpetual genocide. Entire races have disappeared, been exterminated or nearly decimated; Mayans, Aztecs, blacks, Jews, et al, so it should come as no surprise that extraterrestrials are treated no better.

In Blomkamp’s 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg, which is included following this review, the director efficiently tells the story that is more detailed in the current feature length version: an alien race of starving four-legged, upright walking insectoids, labeled by humans as “prawns,” for their vaguely crustacean appearance have been “rescued” from their hovering mother ship which came to rest over Johannesburg, South Africa 28 years earlier.

The screenplay by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, wisely avoids the usual pitfalls of alien invasion movies. The alien race is never named, except for the obvious racist “prawn” moniker and we never learn where they were headed before running out of fuel over South Africa or any description of their home planet other than is has seven moons. In a voice over explanation, with accompanying footage, the military cuts their way into the ship and remove all the occupants, who appear leaderless and malnourished.

Charged with the task of controlling the 1.8 million aliens is Multi-National United (MNU), a private corporation more concerned with a huge cache of confiscated weaponry than the well being of the aliens who are living in deplorable shacks and unable to return to their space craft.

The Nigerian mob rule District 9 and like any criminal enterprises offer the prawns everything from cat food (their favorite food which apparently gets them high in a manner similar to cat nip) to interspecies prostitution. There are witch doctors who bring paralyzed mob boss Mumbo alien arms to eat convincing him he can absorb their powers to operate the weapons they have amassed.

The film opens recounting events that occurred following MNU’s plans to relocate the entire population to an area further away from the city. By mixing a documentary style approach, complete with cable news feeds across the bottom of the screen and interviews with scientists, sociologists, military brass, people on the street and family members of Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), the story unfolds in an inverted real time manner since what the audience is viewing has already occurred.

Wikus is an operative of MNU whose job is to facilitate the “eviction” of the aliens so they can be moved into District 10, which is actually a worse location than the squalid District 9. He is married to Vanessa Haywood (Tania van der Merwe), whose father heads MNU. There is a disgusting realism to the planned relocation as Wikus is seen going door to door trying to get signatures from the occupants. Copley’s character is thankfully not written as a usual movie hero and is portrayed as arrogant, racist and even sadistic, as in a scene where he laughingly compares the sound made by the incineration of alien eggs as similar making popcorn.

In one particular squalid dwelling, Wikus carelessly mishandles a canister of fluid which immediately begins altering his human DNA. We have already learned that the liquid, which has taken 20 years to synthesize, is fuel that can power up the mother ship so the aliens can leave earth. Wikus begins to ooze black liquid from his nose, among other disgusting secretions, as he begins his transformation from human into prawn.

The change is revolting but philosophically enriching as Wikus quickly learns the proverbial other side of the equation when MNU scientists begin experimenting with newly acquired tentacles to replace his left hand, which can activate all manner of weapons. Wikus is now the most important life form on the planet and MNU plans to harvest his new DNA to control the arsenal. After forcing Wikus use an innocent prawn for target practice, he affects a daring escape, and travels back to District where he meets the alien who created the fuel, Christopher Johnson (voiced by Jason Cope) and his cute tiny son, CJ.

Johnson promises he can reverse the transformation; however, it will take three years! There is an uneasy alliance between the alien and Wikus, who is impatient to wait three years, but he agrees to an assault to steal the canister from MNU’s underground research facility. With weapons Wikus steals from Mumbo, who promises revenge by eating his arm, the duo wages a bloody battle before returning with the canister into District 9 so Christopher can power the command module that is conveniently hidden beneath his shack.

The climactic battle with heavily armed MNU soliders and the Nigerian thugs contains plentiful carnage. The dénouement is appropriately disturbing and genuinely profound in equal measures. The final visuals hint at possible continuation, which would be misguided since the films’ ambiguousness is satisfying offering rays of hope from hopelessness and metaphorical nilhism.

The allegory should not be lost on attentive viewers and the early narrative exposition, provided by footage from the pseudo documentary, security cameras and the “news crew” following Wilkus, as he traverses the shanty town environs, succeeds in giddy verisimilitude.

Acting kudos to Copley, who carries much of the film on his mutating shoulders and realistically convey fear, duplicity and even thoughtlessness late into the film. With the alien’s language subtitled (Copley and others, although unexplained, are capable of translating the language in a manner they may confuse professors of ESL) Cope brings a level of humanity to his alien while others are uniformly good in limited roles. The alien eyes express a wide range of emotions and the tentacles that cover their mouths evoke more pathos than the humans.

As expected, the special effects are top-notch, with plenty of CGI and prosthetic work mixed with miniatures and full scale from Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based WETA Digital, and additional alien creature visual effects from Image Engine in Vancouver, Canada and The Embassy Visual Effects, Zoic Studios. The score by Clinton Shorter is superb; mixing traditional musical motifs with African vocals that is haunting while cinematography by Trent Opaloch, using HD-to-35mm is highly effective.

Alive in Joburg

(New Zealand with English and Nyanja dialogue) A Sony Pictures Entertainment (in North America) release of a Peter Jackson presentation in association with TriStar Pictures and Block/Hanson of a WingNut Films (New Zealand) production. Produced by Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham; executive producers, Bill Block and Ken Kamins; co-producer, Philippa Boyens; co-executive producers, Paul Hanson and Elliot Ferwerda. Directed by Neill Blomkamp from a screenplay by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.

Camera (color, HD-to-35mm), Trent Opaloch; editor, Julian Clarke; music, Clinton Shorter; music supervisor, Michelle Belcher; production designer, Philip Ivey; art directors, Emilia Weavind CQ, Mike Berg; lead set decorator, Guy Potgieter; costume designer, Diana Cilliers; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Ken Saville, Lebo Mawasha, Basiami Segola; supervising sound editors, Brent Burge, Chris Ward; sound designer, Dave Whitehead; re-recording mixers, Michael Hedges, Gilbert Lake; visual effects supervisors, Dan Kaufman, Robert Habros, Matt Aitken, Trevor Adams, Patti Gannon; visual effects, Image Engine, the Embassy Visual Effects, Weta Digital, Zoic Studios; weapons, creatures and makeup effects, Weta Workshop; stunt coordinator, Grant Hulley; line producer, Trishia Downie; assistant director, Paul Grinder; casting, Denton Douglas.

Reviewed at the Hollywood 16 Theater, August 14, 2009. Rated R for Bloody Violence and Pervasive Language. 1:52

Cast
Sharlto Copley - Wikus van der Merwe
Jason Cope - Voice of Christopher Johnson
Vanessa Haywood - Tania van der Merwe
and David James, Mandla Gaduka, Kenneth Nkosi, Eugene Khumbanyiwa, Louis Minnaar and William Allen Young

By Henry B. Rosenbush

South African born Neil Blomkamp, who started in visual effects before turning to directing, brings an interesting twist on the illegal alien scenario with the upcoming science fiction film, District 9

The subject of illegal aliens, or immigrants or whatever one wishes to designate them, is always a divisive topic that few rational people will ever understand. We are all humans, yet race, gender, wealth, education and religion (to name a few) divides the entire planet into different camps. District 9 is one such camp created to seperate humans and “non-humans” and long before English imports came to the shores of the northern continent and began forcing the Indian occupants across the country humans have been enslaving, torturing and killing one another. Hebrews were enslaved by Egyptians; women have been enslaved by men; blacks were enslaved by whites and the list of one race exerting power or control over another is rampant throughout the world making any complete list impossible. Everything from religious beliefs - or disbeliefs - to government sanctioned hatred leads to “ethnic cleansing, a phrase made all the more twisted by the fact only the human mind could conceive and execute such horrific plans.

In 1988, the film Alien Nation (it was followed by a short-lived television series and several mid-90s Made-forTV movies) addressed the ugliness of immigrants facing anger and resentment but the twist was these “Newcomers” were extraterrestrials. The film was uneven but offered a stellar (pardon the pun) performance by Mandy Patinkin as an alien detective assigned to ride with bigoted cop James Caan, whose human partner was killed by drug-running Newcomers.

It was basically a genre hybrid of police procedural and science fiction allegory and exposed the human weaknesses of distrust and hatred for all things different. In the end, it teetered on buddy film as the raw-beaver eating George (Patinkin) and Matthew (Caan) finally settled their differences to work together and bring down alien drug lord William Harcort (Terrence Stamp), who had assimiliated well into human high society.

John Sayles offered a lower budget variation with an alien-in-the-hood, in the effectively low-key, but highly cerebral, The Brother From Another Planet (1984). The film deposited The Brother (Joe Morton) in Harlem after he escaped from a planet where he was enslaved. His unique talent comes in the form of technical wizardy; he can fix a pinball machine by touching it. The mute brother is protected by other brothers when white alien bounty hunters (director Sayles and David Strathairn) come to take him home.

By far one of the most startling displays of human meanness towards aliens occurs in the finale of Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) based on the Walter (The Hustler) Tevis novel. This cult favorite was proof singer/musician David Bowie was a superb actor and his performance as Mr. Sussex is riveting and always visually arresting thanks to cinematographer-turned-director, Roeg. Having come to save his dying planet, which has consumed all of its water and natural resources (sound eerily familiar?), parleys inventions into a vast and wealthy empire with the hope of transporting water back home, but in the end he is consumed by earthly vices; gin, sex, greed, etc. and is finally destroyed by the influences with no small help from the government who wants to control him. His friends turn against him and the ones who don’t are murdered.

Plagued by nightmarish dreams of his family succumbing on the bone-dry planet, the film was more an allegory than standard science fiction film. When doctors remove his protective lens and use X-rays that destroy his unique abilities the audience feels as powerless as Sussex. He can never return home and in the end he is reduced to just another reclusive, eccentric alcoholic.

The Terminator films introduced mistrusted aliens be they cybernetic killer robots or future versions of present day humans who find themselves unwelcomed in the 20th and 21st Century. In fact, to that end, the entire series posits that Skynet is involved in human race ethnic cleansing in order to rid the entire planet of humanoids. Even The Twilight Zone’s episode “People are alike all over,” ended with an astronaut, portrayed by Robby McDowell, finding himself caged in a Martian zoo to the delight of the visitors who look upon him as an animal; just another alien species.

How well was Bumblebee treated in Transformers? Electro-shocked. The real menace, Megatron was dropped into the deepest part of the ocean rather than melted into scrape metal merely so it could later be revived in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to wreak far more destruction on earth. John Carpenter’s Starman (1984) proposed what might occur if an advanced race answered our invitation from Voyager II (launched in 1977) to visit earth; we tried to capture and kill him. Surely, Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) expected warmer greetings even if his mission was to warn earth to confine our warring and prejudiced natures to our own planet.

A clever pop-culture-infused science fiction comedy, Joe Dante’s Explorers (1985), introduced the alien Wak who is fascinated by earth television, radio and movie broadcast signals. In numerous well-conceived vignettes, Wak, who has “captured” three young boys in their homemade space ship, displays scenes from a variety of sources, where aliens are mistreated and/or annihilated on earth. His shivering frightening reactions, he is after all a friendly child-like alien, speaks volumes and is an unlearned lesson to earth: all those signals of violence and hatred beaming into space say far more about the human species than the brief altruistic musings on the Voyager II disc.

Any intelligent life in the universe (and I believe there is plenty out there) would be foolish to merely land on earth expecting an olive branch of peace, especially if, like Wak, they have seen the myriad science fiction films depicting alien life forms as invaders and always destructive. Who are we kidding? Humans are the most destructive creatures to ever populate this planet and we prove it repeatedly throughout the continents and ages.

Oscar winning director Peter (Lord of the Rings Trilogy) Jackson produces this August 14th release; Rated R for Bloody Violence and Pervasive Language. District 9 looks particularly alarming as squalid South African ghettos are used to great effect as the captured bi-ped style insect aliens are forced to live separate from humans and under the control of a private company called Multi-National United (MNU). It seems the aliens, treated as refugees on earth, came here 28 years earlier and are the last of their species. Do humans welcome them? No, in fact, we somehow capture not only these visitors but their massive space craft as well making it impossible for them to leave earth.

MNU, who could care less about these mistreated visitors, stands to make huge profits if they learn how the alien’s weapons work, something they have been unable to achieve. MNU field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) becomes the most wanted man on the planet after he contracts an unusual virus causing his DNA to mutate and he finds his only refuge is to escape into District 9.

The website allows visitors to enter as human or alien and receive information about both races. Naturally, I entered as a non-human and as expected the voiceover is smug and advises rules and regulations that the aliens must follow, all of which are particularly dealienizing.

As one Public Service announcement promises:

“Keeping humans safe by keeping non-humans separate.” I pose a question: Who are the real illegal aliens?