District 9: Difference between revisions

District 9
American theatrical release poster
Directed by	Neill Blomkamp
Written by	Neill Blomkamp Terri Tatchell
Produced by	Peter Jackson
Starring	Sharlto Copley Jason Cope Robert Hobbs
Cinematography	Trent Opaloch
Edited by	Julian Clarke
Music by	Clinton Shorter
Production companies	WingNut Films QED International Key Creatives Wintergreen Productions
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures
Release dates	August 13, 2009 New Zealand and Australia August 14, 2009 United States and Canada September 4, 2009 United Kingdom October 15, 2009 South Korea
Running time	112 minutes
Countries	South Africa New Zealand
Languages	English Afrikaans
Budget	$30 million[1]
Box office	$105,149,708[2]

District 9 is a 2009 South African science fiction film directed by Neill Blomkamp, written by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, and produced by Peter Jackson. The film stars Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, and Robert Hobbs. Copley plays the role of Wikus van de Merwe, a bureaucrat assigned to relocate a stranded alien species from a refugee camp in Johannesburg, South Africa to a new one outside the city. After his exposure to a substance that alters his DNA, Wikus must help the aliens escape the planet so they can return him to normal.

The story, adapted from Alive in Joburg, a 2005 short film directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Sharlto Copley, deals with the issues of xenophobia and social segregation. The title and premise of District 9 were inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa under apartheid in a residential area of Cape Town named District Six. The film was produced for $30 million and shot on location in Chiawelo, Soweto, presenting fictional interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras in the style of a mock documentary. A viral marketing campaign began in 2008 at the San Diego Comic-Con, and the theatrical trailer appeared in July 2009. Released on August 14, 2009 in North America by TriStar Pictures, the film received positive reviews and earned $37 million on its opening weekend.

In the late 20th century, an alien ship stops directly above Johannesburg, South Africa. Reports suggest the ship became stranded after a command module separated from the ship and disappeared, presumably landing somewhere near the city. After cutting their way inside, a team discovers a large group of malnourished and leaderless arthropod-like aliens. The creatures are taken from the ship and housed in a government camp inside Johannesburg called District 9, which eventually turns into a slum. Several decades later, Multinational United (MNU), a private military contractor, is placed in charge of policing and relocating the 1.8 million aliens to District 10, a new camp 240 kilometers from Johannesburg.

Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is an MNU field operative assigned to manage the relocation operation. As the eviction of the aliens unfolds, three aliens—two adults and a child—distill a liquid from a piece of alien technology into a small canister. During a raid, Wikus confiscates the device and accidentally sprays some of the liquid on his face. He then tries to evict the hut's occupant, who resists and is killed. Later, the other adult, which MNU has named Christopher Johnson, and his son go back to their hut, which is then raided by Wikus. Unlike other aliens, Christopher questions the legality of the eviction and demands his rights. That night, Wikus falls ill and is taken to a local hospital, where they find his left arm has become an alien appendage. Wikus is then taken into custody by MNU personnel who intend to vivisect and kill him in an attempt to replicate his ability to operate alien weapons—usually useless to humans due to their bond with alien biology—but Wikus' new strength allows him to overpower his captors and escape.

Now a fugitive, Wikus takes refuge in District 9 and returns to Christopher Johnson's hut. Christopher reveals that the canister Wikus found contains fuel for the lost command module hidden under his hut, which would allow him to activate the mother ship and leave the planet. Christopher agrees to help reverse Wikus' genetic transformation if he, in turn, retrieves the confiscated fuel that is now in possession of the MNU. Wikus agrees and goes on to steal some alien weaponry from a local Nigerian gang, led by paralyzed warlord Obesandjo, who wants to eat Wikus' mutated arm, which he believes will give him the power to operate alien weaponry.

Wikus and Christopher break into MNU and retrieve the fuel canister. They fight their way back to District 9, but Christopher, having just learned that MNU is performing medical experiments on his race, informs Wikus that he has decided he must return to his homeworld to seek help for his people before he can cure Wikus, which would take three years. Frustrated, Wikus knocks Christopher unconscious and powers up the command module with the help of Christopher's young son. Shortly after Wikus lifts off, MNU soldiers destroy one of the command module's engines with a missile, causing it to crash land nearby.

MNU forces take Wikus and Christopher prisoner but their convoy falls under attack by Obesandjo's gang and a fierce gun battle breaks out. The Nigerian gang captures Wikus and prepares to sever his arm for Obesandjo. From the command module, Christopher's son activates the mother ship and powers up a mechanized battle suit that autonomously kills Obesandjo and his men. Wikus then gets into the suit and uses it to rescue Christopher from MNU mercenaries and provide him with cover while he makes his way to the command module. Promising Wikus that he will return in three years to reverse his transformation, Christopher summons a tractor beam and docks with the mother ship. Heavily wounded and in a much more advanced state of his mutation, Wikus crawls out of the battle suit and Venter, the sole survivor of the MNU squad, confronts him. However, aliens in the camp dismember and eat Venter before he is able to kill Wikus.

After decades of hovering above Johannesburg, the mother ship leaves with Christopher and his son on board. A series of interviews and news broadcasts provide various opinions on the events. The aliens are successfully moved to District 10, said to have a population of 2.5 million. One of Wikus' co-workers hacks into MNU's database and publicly exposes their illegal genetic experiments. People theorize about Wikus' fate, and others hypothesize that the aliens might return for the refugees, or even to declare war on humanity. Wikus' wife reveals that having found a small metal flower on her doorstep, she has hope that her husband is still alive. Later, in a scrapyard, an alien is seen crafting a similar flower out of metal.

• Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe, a worker at the MNU Department for Relations with Extraterrestrial Civilizations
• Jason Cope as Grey Bradnam, the UKNR Chief Correspondent. Cope was also the suit performer for all speaking aliens.^[3]
• Eugene Khumbanyiwa as Obesandjo, a Nigerian warlord
• William Allen Young as Dirk Michaels, MNU CEO
• Robert Hobbs as Ross Pienaar
• Kenneth Nkosi as Thomas
• Nathalie Boltt as Sarah Livingstone, a sociologist at Kempton Park University
• Sylvaine Strike as Katrina McKenzie, a doctor from the Department of Social Assistance
• John Summer as Les Feldman, an MIL engineer
• Nick Blake as Francois Moraneu, a member of the CIV Engineer Team
• Jed Brophy as James Hope, the ACU chief of police
• Louis Minnaar as Piet Smit, Wikus' father in law
• Vittorio Leonardi as Michael Bloemstein
• Mandla Gaduka as Fundiswa Mhlanga
• Johan van Schoor as Nicolas van de Merwe, Wikus' father
• Marian Hooman as Sandra van de Merwe, Wikus' mother
• Vanessa Haywood as Tania van de Merwe, Wikus' wife
• Stella Steenkamp as Phyllis Sinderson, a co-worker of Wikus'
• David James as Kobus Venter, a sadistic soldier sent to capture Wikus. The film's main antagonist
• Tim Gordon as Clive Henderson, an entomologist at WLG University
• Jonathan Taylor as the Doctor

Like Alive in Joburg, the short film it's based on, District 9's setting is inspired by historical events that took place in South Africa during the apartheid, with the film's title particularly referencing District Six. District Six, an inner-city residential area in Cape Town was declared a "whites only" area by the government in 1966, with 60,000 people forcibly removed and relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away, for the next several decades.^[4] The film also seems to refer to contemporary evictions and forced removals to new ghettos in post-apartheid South Africa.^[5] This includes the high profile attempted force removal of Joe Slovo Informal Settlement in Cape Town to Temporary Relocation Areas in Delft and evictions in the shack settlement where the film was actually shot.Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page).

The theme of racism and xenophobia is reflected in the use of the word "prawn" to describe the aliens. The term "prawn" is used as a derogatory reference to the Parktown prawn, a king cricket species considered a plague in South Africa.^[6] While the film clearly bears this social and cultural relevance, however, Copley said it wasn't the main focus in the work, and you could even miss it, but it would still work at an unconscious level.^[7]

Producer Peter Jackson planned to produce a film adaptation of the Halo video games with Neill Blomkamp to direct the film. When the adaptation was placed on hold due to lack of financing, Jackson and Blomkamp discussed alternate projects to pursue and chose to film District 9 as producer and director. For Blomkamp, who previously directed commercials and short films, District 9 was his first feature film. The director wrote the script with Terri Tatchell and chose to film in South Africa, where he was born.^[8] Blomkamp emulated in District 9 the world explored in his short film "Alive in Joburg"; he and Tatchell chose characters, moments, and concepts that were interesting to them and fleshed out these elements for the feature film.^[9]

QED International fully financed the production of the independent film, underwriting the negative cost prior to American Film Market (AFM) 2007. At AFM 2007, QED entered into a distribution deal with Sony Pictures under TriStar Pictures for North America, all other English-language territories, Korea, Italy, Russia and Portugal.^[10]

The film was shot on location in Chiawelo, Soweto during a time of violent unrest in Alexandra, Gauteng and other South African townships involving clashes between native South Africans and Africans born in other countries.^[11] The location that portrays District 9 in itself was in fact a real impoverished neighbourhood from which people were being forcibly relocated to government-subsidised housing.^[3]

Blomkamp said no one film influenced District 9 but cited the 1980s "hardcore, sci-fi/action" films such as Alien, Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Predator, and RoboCop as subconscious influences. The director said, "I don't know whether the film has that feeling or not for the audience, but I wanted it to have that harsh 1980s kind of vibe -- I didn't want it to feel glossy and slick."^[9]

The aliens in District 9 were designed by a person at Weta Workshop, and the design was executed by Image Engine. Blomkamp established criteria for the design of the aliens; he wanted the species to be insectile but also bipedal. The director wanted the audience to relate to the aliens and said of the restriction on the creature design, "Unfortunately, they had to be human-esque because our psychology doesn't allow us to really empathize with something unless it has a face and an anthropomorphic shape. Like if you see something that's four-legged, you think it's a dog; that's just how we're wired... If you make a film about an alien force, which is the oppressor or aggressor, and you don't want to empathize with them, you can go to town. So creatively that's what I wanted to do but story-wise, I just couldn't."^[12] Blomkamp originally sought to have Weta Digital design the creatures, but the company was busy with effects for Avatar. The director then decided to choose a Vancouver-based effects company because he anticipated to make films there in the future and because British Columbia offered a tax credit. Blomkamp met with Image Engine and considered them "a bit of a gamble" since the company had not pursued a project as large as a feature film.^[9]

Weta Digital instead designed the mother ship and the drop ship, while the exo-suit and the little pets were designed by The Embassy Visual Effects. Zoic Studios performed overflow 2D work.^[9] On-set live special effects were created by MXFX.^{[citation needed]}

Sony Pictures launched a "Humans Only" marketing campaign to promote District 9. Sony's marketing team designed its promotional material to emulate the segregational billboards that appear throughout the film.^[12] Billboards, banners, posters, and stickers were thus designed with the theme in mind, and the material was spread across public places such as bus stops in various cities, including "humans only" signs in certain locations and providing toll-free numbers to report "non-human" activity.^[13][14] Promotional material was also presented at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, advertising the website D-9.com, which had an application presented by the fictional Multi-National United (MNU). The website had a local alert system for Johannesburg (the film's setting), news feeds, behavior recommendations, and rules and regulations. Other viral websites for the film were also launched, including a MNU website with a countdown timer for the film's release, an anti-MNU blog run by Christopher Johnson, and a MNU-sponsored educational website.^[15]

District 9 opened in 3,049 theaters in the United States and Canada on August 14, 2009, and the film ranked first at the weekend box office with an opening gross of $37,354,308. Among comparable science fiction films in the past, its opening attendance was slightly less than the 2008 film Cloverfield and the 1997 film Starship Troopers. The audience demographic for District 9 was 64 percent male and 57 percent people 25 years or older.^[13] The film stood out as a summer film that generated strong business despite little-known casting.^[16] Its opening success was attributed to the studio's unusual marketing campaign. In the film's second weekend, it dropped 49% in revenue competing against the opening film Inglourious Basterds for the male audience, and Sony Pictures attributed the "good hold" to District 9's strong playability.^[17] As of August 30, 2009, it has grossed an estimated $90,813,000 in the United States and Canada and $14,336,708 in other territories for a worldwide total of $105,149,708.^[2]

District 9 earned overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 89% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on a sample of 183, with an average score of 7.7 out of 10. The website wrote of the consensus, "Technically brilliant and emotionally wrenching, District 9 has action, imagination, and all the elements of a thoroughly entertaining science-fiction classic."^[18] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 81 based on 33 reviews.^[19]

Sara Vilkomerson of The New York Observer writes, "District 9 is the most exciting science fiction movie to come along in ages; definitely the most thrilling film of the summer; and quite possibly the best film I've seen all year."^[20] Christy Lemire from the Associated Press was impressed by the plot and thematic content, claiming that "District 9 has the aesthetic trappings of science fiction but it's really more of a character drama, an examination of how a man responds when he's forced to confront his identity during extraordinary circumstances."^[21] Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum described it as "...madly original, cheekily political, [and] altogether exciting..."^[22]

Roger Ebert praised the film for "giving us aliens to remind us not everyone who comes in a spaceship need be angelic, octopod or stainless steel," but complains that "...the third act is disappointing, involving standard shoot-out action. No attempt is made to resolve the situation, and if that's a happy ending, I've seen happier. Despite its creativity, the film remains space opera and avoids the higher realms of science-fiction."^[23]

New York Press critic Armond White lambasted it for its outlandish premise and perceived racial insensitivity toward its apartheid allegories. He asserts that "Blomkamp and Jackson want it every which way: The actuality-video threat of The Blair Witch Project, unstoppable violence like ID4 plus Spielberg's otherworldly benevolence: factitiousness, killing and cosmic agape. This is how cinema gets turned into trash."^[24]

In South Africa the film grossed 5 times better than that of the award winning Tsotsi film with much less exposure. The Rude Awakening team from 94.7 Highveld Stereo, a local Johannesburg radio station, led by Jeremy Mansfield and Sam Cowen, were the first South Africans to interview the director and protagonist, applauding the performance and overall story of the film. In the interview Neill Blomkamp called it "a South African Hollywood film" and the RAW team agreed.

On August 1, 2009, two weeks before District 9 was released to theaters, Neil Blomkamp hinted that he intended to make a sequel if the film was successful enough and again upon the interview with the Rude Awakening he fully admitted to it saying "There probably will be". Nevertheless, he revealed that his next project is unrelated to the District 9 universe.^[25]

• http://www.district9movie.com
• http://D-9.com
• http://www.multinationalunited.com
• http://www.mnuspreadslies.com
• http://mathsfromouterspace.com

• District 9 at IMDb
• District 9 at Rotten Tomatoes
• District 9 at Metacritic
• District 9 at Box Office Mojo
• District 9 at Vancouver Film School