Maria, my brilliant wife, summed up District Nine in this way: there were ten nominations for Best Picture this year at the Oscars. And that pretty much hits the nail right on the head.

District Nine is an interesting film. Set in the style of a documentary, at times, it follows the life of a mid-level bureaucrat in Johannesburg, South Africa charged with resettling an alien race from their slums near the city, to a location farther away. Sounds interesting? Let me elaborate. According to the alternative reality created by the film, in the 1980’s an alien ship appears over Johannesburg. It’s engines are disabled and when humans make contact with the aliens aboard, they find them to be very sickly and weak, apparently unable to get their ship working again. Helpless. So, the aliens are settled, on earth, in a slum town near Johannesburg. The aliens are treated poorly, looked down upon, and seen as a nussiance, a threat to South Africans, and are therefore slated to be resettled into a new slum camp further from the city centre. The resettlement job falls into the hands of Wikus Van De Merwe, a mid-level government paper-pusher.

Like I said, it’s an interesting film. District Nine is a blatant commentary of the South African apartheid. While some might criticize the obvious allegory in the film it didn’t strike me as a heavy-handed piece. The message isn’t “apartheid is bad,” it’s “apartheid is complicated, here is how it affects people.” The message isn’t a political one, it’s a humanist one, which is ironic given that the humans are played by an alien race.

The style of District Nine is interesting in itself. Setting it as both a documentary—these things really happened—and a drama/thriller is a pretty neat choice. At times, it works very well and the use of the documentary, talking head bits, adds a lot to the context of the film—it draws you in to this real world. Sadly, at other times, the transition between documentary-style and dramatic/thriller bits is just jarring. Several times I felt like I was shaken out of the movie’s atmosphere because of these transitions.

The pacing of the movie and the plot are great. It’s a fast-paced movie, once it gets going, and aside from the sometimes distracting transitions, it does draw you in pretty well. It’s interesting. It’s a good story. The main character, our beloved bureaucrat whom the story centers around, is entirely engaging. His character is truly lovable and his wide-eyed and innocent approach to his career and his job lands him in any number of hilarious situations. You’ll laugh. But he’s a complicated character, and that’s a great thing to create in a film: at different times you’ll love him and hate him to death.

All told, I’ll return to the sentiment I opened this review with. There were a total of 10 Oscar nominations this year. If there were, say, 4 or 5, District Nine would not be among them. It’s a good film, truly, a great movie. It’s a realistic commentary on a difficult situation, a hard time in history. It’s well-acted, well-paced and generally well-done. It’s new, and different, a real innovative and original film. But, do these merits warrant an Oscar nomination? Probably, I would say, no.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 10:59 am and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.