District 9 review: spare us the hype

Over the weekend I finally got around to watching Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi experiment District 9. This was much hyped in the New Zealand media when it first came out, mostly, I suspect, because Peter Jackson was involved (as producer). However, even in New Zealand, the headline "Newsflash! Peter Jackson does something!" gets old pretty quickly. To get around this the media tried to hype District 9 for other reasons: that it was "original", "political", and "challenging". The same justification was given for each of these adjectives - as a movie set in a slum in Johannesburg, District 9 was clearly a veiled commentary on racial tension.

So naturally, I watched it expecting a veiled commentary on racial tension, with some aliens and explosions on the side.

Instead I got an awful and highly predictable doco-style first half, with bogus shaky camerawork presumably intended to make it look more "political", followed by a highly derivative and improbable second half which embraced all the worst cliches of the sci-fi genre while disregarding everything good which saves the genre from itself.

Slimy tentacled things? Check. Gaping plot holes? Check. Shock close-ups of gooey stuff? Check. Mysteriously humanoid aliens? Check. Rapid-fire, meaningless gunfights? Check. A heroic doomed raid on a secure site which inexplicably succeeds? Check. A random villain devoid of ordinary human emotion? Check. A fricking android suit? For crying out loud, check.

I hate fricking android suits. They're on two legs. Why two legs? If you were going to go out and build the ultimate armoured vehicle, would it have two legs so it could be completely incapacitated by a single injury to a joint? No it would not. It would be more in the order of a tank. A flying tank. Maybe even an amphibious flying tank. But it wouldn't have two legs, or four, or ten - it would have something stable, like wheels or tracks, and a low centre of gravity. Come on, people. Android suits are just fucking stupid.

So much for the overblown sci-fi second half. The doco-style first half was a little better, but not much. It was, indeed, "challenging" - it showed humans committing some (fairly routine, for humans) atrocities against the alien refugees in their midst. It was "political" - it cast humans as the bad guys, thus reversing the default power structure and leaving room to question the assumptions behind it. And it was reasonably "original" - being from somewhere other than Hollywood, it had a freshness about it which was good to see.

But it went nowhere. It concluded nothing. It failed to provoke any serious questioning about the meaning of humanity, the rights of non-human beings, the nature of intolerance, or any of the many other difficult themes which were briefly raised and then quickly dismissed. And just when it looked as though some of the hard questions were about to be asked, some idiot got himself sprayed with a tube of unknown alien liquid and the whole thing turned into a personal struggle for survival.

What we learn from District 9 is this: it's always easier to focus on the personal than the political, to save the single individual rather than fight for the many, to interpret the world through emotion rather than ethics. So long as there is a hero and he survives, everything is okay. And we also learn this: not everything that Peter Jackson touches turns to gold.