Prawn Rock-Tale

I wonder if the Hollywood studio system gets introspective when it sees something like Neil Blompkamp's District 9, a modestly budgeted science fiction extravaganza made outside the studio system. Produced by Peter Jackson, it's an amalgamation of familiar science fiction concepts fused into a top class display of imagination.

So we get the huge alien flying saucer hovering above a major city (Independence Day/V). The aliens (nicknamed Prawns) live on earth and interact uneasily with the native human population (Alien Nation). A down to earth guy comes into contact with new technology and undergoes an undesirable transformation (The Fly/Robocop). Finally, having learned a few home truths, the hero puts selfish desires aside and fights for freedom (Han Solo/Avatar).

But this combination of story elements has never been told with this much gritty realism. The Johannesburg setting provides a different setting for a mainstream action movie while the hand held camera style leaves you with a vividly realistic sense of time and place. The documentary framework which starts off the movie and frequently reappears throughout allows the audience to become familiar with the unusual environment, situation, characters and relationships in a way that's informative, and easy to digest.

For something that deals with a subject as heavy as the forced mass-relocation of a race, the film is loaded with sharp humour, which isn't dulled by a child-frindly rating (the first translated Prawn dialogue is "F~~k Off!"). Add to that the balls out action of RoboCop (the great exo-skeleton shoot-em up), the gross-out body horror of a Cronenberg movie (exploding bodies) and the sharp topical alagory that marks the best science fiction work.

Newcomer Sharlto Copley make a spectacular enterance to the world of acting as Wikus, the blindly oppressive, out-of-his-depth, career focused, bureaucrat who does good. The alien prawns also put in good performances courtesy of Weta Digital; they're the best non-verbal animation outside of Phil Tippett's effects house, with each prawn having a distinct personality.

Like all good movie-blends, it's not the ingrediants but HOW the movie mixes them. The action, humour, horror and thriller aspects are finely balanced. It has a break-neck pace, slimey villains and even a touching love story thrown into the mix. Most importantly, it never loses focus on the importance of character despite the intense events depicted. It's tense too as you're never sure how things will pan out for Wikus, and his Prawn sidekick Christopher Johnson. This is low-budget, non-studio sci-fi so a happy ending isn't necesarely guarenteed.

I wonder if Hollywood is ready to fund Blompkamp's Halo adaptation now. Then again, showing what excellence can be achieved without them, will he really want to anymore?