mondojohnson

District 9, the much anticipated film directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson, will no doubt take its place alongside Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Alien as a strikingly original sci-fi vision. Like those legendary films, District 9 peers into an eerily plausible and grimy alternate reality where humans are put into dramatic conflict with strange new life forms — yielding insights that are alternately funny, terrifying and profound.

The plot, as you have probably heard, involves aliens whose ship has broken down over Johannesburg, South Africa. It hovers over the city quietly and uneventfully until the humans can’t take the suspense anymore and drill into the ship’s hull. There they find a million or so malnourished creatures, which they ferry off the ship and place into a refugee camp. The camp quickly devolves into a slum, and the aliens — derisively dubbed “prawns” because of their exoskeletons — are increasingly resented. Management of the slum has been contracted out to a Haliburton-style multinational corporation called MNU, whose motives in District 9 are dubious.

The human protagonist is a bureaucrat within MNU, and we follow him as he serves eviction notices to the aliens — MNU is planning to move them all to District 10, a new and improved concentration camp that will at least make the problem less visible. During his work he is suddenly forced to look at the stranded aliens in a different light….

The alien protagonist holds a special place in my heart because he has been given the human name Christopher Johnson for administrative purposes. Having lived with that instantly forgettable moniker myself all these years, I can attest to its dehumanizing power. I have been stopped by customs several times — once even put into a windowless little room — just because I was confused with some other no-goodnik named Christopher Johnson. I’m hoping the film might paradoxically inject a little pizazz into my boring name.

The film evokes Darfur, Iraq, Rwanda, Palestine and dozens of other real-world heartbreaks. It also skewers the heartless and stateless obscenity of huge military contractors. The banality of MNU’s evil is depicted humorously (and creepily ) in mockumentary interviews with the company’s HR personnel and other midlevel bureaucrats.

I don’t want to give anything else away, except to say that the film makes room for its sequel in a very intelligent and encouraging way. But the film can, and will, stand on its own as an important event in sci-fi cinema.