I have at least a couple of District 9 reviews bookmarked but unread; I want to write this while they remain so. I don’t want to have my molehills made into mountains for me. I think there are elements of the film that skeptics (and I’m surprised I haven’t heard of more of them; I think a couple days ago its Rotten Tomatoes rating was 99%) will seize on, and I’m not sure I blame them–particularly after the long final action-movie act, which was long enough and action-movie enough to give lie to similar complaints against Children of Men. When there’s more than one instance of a bad guy receiving a kill order and taking his sweet time with actually pulling the damn trigger the better to savor the moment, when there are seemingly more saved-at-the-last-minutes than there are actual last minutes, when a giant robot uses a pig as a weapon, it can be pretty easy to write off the preceding hour and a half as summer-movie cliche. And there are certainly summer-movie cliches are present in the film; my biggest gripe was the wife’s non-character, and most of the bad guys from whatever faction are solidly one-dimensional. But these cliches are really, really, really not the sum total of the film. At all.

Though I had not been closely following the pre-release hype for District 9, I’m obviously at least semi-plugged in to most horror movies and genre movies generally, and have an affinity for whatever Peter Jackson gets up to as well. So as far as I knew, this was an interesting little genre movie from abroad, given Peter Jackson’s seal of approval the same way Guillermo Del Toro’s name on The Orphange got that movie a little more traction here in the States. I expected something on the scale of The Host, in other words. Lo and behold, today I hear it was the number-one film in the country this past weekend. I can only imagine what the Transformers 2 audiences made of this fucking thing. From the initial mockumentary set-up (complete with audience-alienating shakicam) to the South African accents to the almost confrontational unpleasantness of the aliens, we’re a long way from G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra, even before you get to the lengthy, relentlessly and creatively gory, catalog-like depiction of inhumanity and brutality that gives District 9 its power. And at that point–shit, even I had a hard time watching.

District 9‘s best trick (aside from realizing that you can get contemporary audiences to swallow a five-minute opening infodump provided you use the now-familiar mockumentary format) is perhaps an accident of its creation. Its South African setting gives its central sci-fi metaphor, squalid alien refugee camps, a historical background everyone can instantly understand, but simultaneously places it at a remove from the analogous situations that dominate the news today. Yes, there’s a tinge of Blackwater here, torture cover-up there. But mostly, instead of seeing, I dunno, occupied Palestine, or occupied Baghdad, or Minutemen vs. Mexicans, you just see beings, oppressors and oppressed, and how oppression rots away the social and moral fabric of both. It’s bad enough when you think you’re just going to watch Pythonesque bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe and a bunch of xenophobic assholes with guns in their hands and a corporation at their backs roll into a slum and start treating sentient beings like less than dogshit–the butterflies in my stomach never left during that whole long first act. But when you see just how bad things get, in a sequence that’s like some nightmare cross between Hostel, Brazil, Starship Troopers, and (at least to me–it’s something in Wikus’s voice) the baseball bat scene in Casino…the audience on 34th St. gasped in horror, the couple in front of me clung to each other, and I literally fought back tears. Even though you’ve still got most of the movie to go before you reach the final shootouts, I think that sequence is where my patience with the explosions and derring-do at the end was earned. You watch it and you believe that yes, this is what we’re capable of, and you think that if you saw it really happening and had the chance to help those you once hated by hurting people who hate them even more than you did, you’d probably take it just like our formerly Gervaisian hero Wikus does. These are uncomfortable and complex thoughts to be provoked by your late-summer action thrill ride.

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