Neill Blomkamp announced himself today in 2009 with his satirical South African body horror sci-fi gem District 9. To think it owes its existence to Master Chief and Peter Jackson.
District 9 takes a familiar concept of aliens visiting us and puts a depressingly realistic spin on it. An alien ship appears over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982. The strange-looking aliens are welcomed and dubbed ‘Prawns’ due to their appearance. Fast-forward to 2010 and the extraterrestrial residents are a forgotten novelty, left to live in a crumbling ghetto with heavy military presence.
The District in the movie is based on a real-life South African district in Cape Town that the apartheid government demolished in 1966 to make room for whites. The plot parallels of District 9 are not subtle, but they are effective in that context.
A munitions company arrives one day to forcibly evict the Prawns from their ghetto. The eviction is led by head operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley in his debut role). Wikus is condescending, quietly hateful, and generally a bit of a dick. He’s in no way sympathetic to the alien plight. Instead, he’s an avatar for how the world views these aliens — exactly the sort you’d like to see have their worldview aggressively shaken up.
And that’s what happens. Wikus gets exposed to a mysterious alien chemical and begins to transform into something else entirely. Now reliant on the very race he was kicking out, he gets to see how life is over the fence, and well…let’s just say there’s no mawkish lesson learned here. Wikus is damned from the second he enters District 9.
From Master Chief to Prawn Blaster
District 9 came about after a movie based on the video game Halo fell through for Blomkamp. Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) was a producer on the project, and rather than let Blomkamp sit on his hands, he offered him $30 million to make whatever he want. What Blomkamp wanted became District 9, and the rest is history.
The movie went on to be nominated for several Oscars, including Best Film. It was the same year the infamous The Hurt Locker v. Avatar slug-fest, however, so it ended awards night disappointed.
Blomkamp went on to make several films with a similar grimy future aesthetic. These included Elysium with Matt Damon and Chappie with Hugh Jackman. Blomkamp later experimented with FX work concepts for Oats Studio. A studio he had created in 2017. All these years later, Blomkamp finally returned to the idea of making a video game film, and it ended up being an unexpected adaptation of the PlayStation racing simulator Gran Turismo.
The director also found himself in the world of actual video games in 2022, when he joined Gunzilla Games to help create the battle royale game Off the Grid.
Blomkamp and Copley revealed they were writing a screenplay for a sequel called District 10 back in 2021. The story would shift from South Africa to the US, but development seems at a standstill. Even if we never get that sequel, however, District 9 is still a great standalone story full of ingenuity, wit, and feeling.
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