8.20.09 Movie Review District 9

Just two noncommercial movie showings upcoming over the next few days, but our commercial movie is almost unusual enough to count as an art movie.

The first of the noncommercials is the Tallgrass Third Thursday movie, reportedly back by special request. It’s titled The Wrecking Crew, after its subject, a sixties and seventies studio band that played backup for everybody from the Monkees to the Beach Boys, with Frank Sinatra and the Mamas and the Papas in between, playing on more #1 hits than the Beatles. The Wrecking Crew shows tonight at 7:30 in Warren West Theatre. And Sunday, the Blank Page has a very unusual double bill of two movies both called Our Daily Bread at 6, the only Depression movie to suggest a greater change than just cleaning up the system, a naïve but interesting story of communal farming, will show followed by some food and then at the customary 7:30, a new documentary about the food we actually eat. Blank Page gallery, Sunday, 6 and 7:30, 917 West Douglas.

And commercially, District 9, like Moon just a few weeks ago, is an unusually mature sci-fi movie that obviously comments on the problems of inconvenient immigration. It seems that an enormous spaceship has been stranded at Johannesburg, South Africa, with a whole community of grotesque armored insects built basically like people and just as big, but with awful tentacle faces and limited ability to talk; they’re basically peaceable and only want to fix their ship and go home, but even their technological genius can work only very slowly with what is available on earth, and there is no indication that people are helping them beyond herding them into huge camps full of tarpaper-and corrugated-metal shacks and letting them raid garbage piles. District 9 is unusual in being more sympathetic to the aliens than to the people, as our hero gets more and more involved with them and learns what nobody else seems to have bothered to learn.

Despite such conventional shortcomings as the human lack of interest in what these master technicians could contribute to our civilization, there is a grimy realism to District 9 that is persuasive; the refugee camp is as grubby and makeshift as pictures we have seen in Slum Millionaire, shelters you can hardly call houses obviously made of scraps of other structures, with posters and painted signs intact and only the scientific equipment at all clean.

Some reviewers talk about District 9 as if it were a real intellectual exercise. It isn’t; it’s full of action and mystery and pursuit and escape, with as much excitement and almost as much violence as ordinary sci-fi movies. There are the usual weapons so big awkward you really need a caddy to carry them, and they as always blow things to pieces. But they don’t figure in the plot the way they usually do. And there’s no sex.

Commentary on bigotry is clear, though there may be a case for the complaint that District 9 itself uses unacceptable stereotypes, I think cultural rather than racial. There is some unclarity as to what is included in the documentary that is used as a narrative device and what is supposedly reality footage, and I thought the hero’s eye was returning to normal at a key point at almost the end, which misled me. But there is little confusion in a plot, that hangs together better than modern movies require; you don’t have to turn off your brain. Plans are obviously afoot for a sequel, and if there is one, I will overcome my usual suspicion of sci-fi and go see it.