COMM 380:  Media Criticism

With the opening shots of Neill Blomkamp’s science fiction thriller District 9, audiences are given a clear and concise mission statement for the film. As a monolithic alien spacecraft hovers over South Africa, its residents, the insect-like “prawns”, live under the watchful eye of military forces in the slums of Johannesburg. Using a mockumentary style and referencing real-world instances of segregation and refugee crises, the opening of District 9 sets the film up to be a stark and bleak examination of the nature of systemic injustices and racial prejudice. However, the film seems to barely scratch the surface in its examination of prejudice and abandons its mockumentary flair in favor of a rather standard, if well-executed, action flick.

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Describing the genre conventions of the mockumentary horror film, Richard Wallace (2021) writes that “In the mockumentary… we find a combination of categorically distinct stylistic and cultural attributes: real-world/fictional diegesis; nonfiction style/fictional content; documentary address/fictional characters and situations; documentary mode of engagement/fictional mode of engagement.” In short, a mockumentary film uses editing techniques of nonfiction films to convey fictional events, and intentionally imitates stylistic elements of documentary films. For example, establishing the man behind the camera as a character in the film, and therefore allowing objects in the scene to act upon or react to the camera in ways that would be seen as unorthodox, if not unacceptable, in a standard film.

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The opening of District 9 follows heavily the conventions of a mockumentary film; the cameraman and the protagonist Wikus exchange words, and newsreel and interview footage are spliced together as if the film was providing coverage of real-world events. The documentary editing proves to be a brilliant tool for exposition, as, within the first 10 minutes of the film, we’re provided with an excellent understanding of the backstory of the film’s world including the origins of the aliens, the people’s reactions to these aliens, and what actions were taken by the government and corporations in order to control the situation. The eviction sequence shows the cameraman weaving around the action, backing away from hostile aliens, allowing the camera to shake in shock at the violent events occurring in the District. The cameraman can be read either as complicit towards the treatment of the prawns or as a daring journalist set on exposing these injustices. What does it mean to point a camera towards a systemic injustice? This question, like many questions surrounding the central theme of the film, is unfortunately not addressed. The mockumentary style is also an effective method to link the events of the film to the history of apartheid in South Africa. Much of the film was shot in Chiawelo, Soweto, where black citizens were forcibly relocated during the beginning of apartheid (Jones 2020). Using grainy handheld cameras and newscasting equipment lends a sense of authenticity to the science fiction events of the film, sending the message that the prawns are unjustly oppressed without having to state it directly in the film.

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Towards the middle of the film, however, these elements are abandoned in favor of more conventional, Hollywood-style storytelling. Instead of focusing collectively on the prawn species, the film picks two prawns, Christopher, and his son, to be a representative for the species in the context of the film, and chooses Wikus as a human protagonist, who comes to a change of heart to help the prawns in their efforts for liberation, unfortunately echoing the common trope of the “white savior”. While the plot still revolves around the oppression of the prawns, and scenes showing experimentations upon prawns still slightly expand upon the central theme of the film, the sudden stylistic change in the film also becomes a major shift in narrative focus, as the heaps of extras and interviewees who provided a greater worldly context for this oppression disappear in favor of a heart-pounding action thriller which seems to laser-focus on its three lead characters. In fact, prawn extras seem to all but disappear from the film as Wikus and Christopher plan their heist, only reappearing for the karmic (and cruelly satisfying) death of the film’s lead antagonist.

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To the film’s credit, the action in District 9 is incredibly well-executed. The action sequences are both emotionally impactful and visually exciting. The believable, yet simultaneously over-the-top performance of Sharlto Copley as Wikus and the excellent effects work on the prawns, who are distinctly inhuman yet are given the ability to emote as a person would give us an emotional anchor which leads us to care about the fate of these characters throughout their dangers, and the action set-pieces are clever and creative, especially the robot which Wikus uses to become a true hero, eviscerating soldiers in an almost cartoonishly gory fashion, while still maneuvering in a clumsy manner expected of a bureaucrat-turned-action-hero.

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While both the film’s narrative-focused action and political world-building-focused mockumentary elements work fantastically on their own, together it makes the film feel less like a whole, united project, and more like two halves of two separate, potential wholes. Runtime spent in the mockumentary style seems to cut into time that could have been spent as an action film, and vice-versa, and while the overall product is still competent, the film can’t help but seem like two separate sources of untapped potential.

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Take, for example, the aforementioned question of what it means to hold a camera in front of an act of injustice. This is just one of many questions that the mockumentary style may raise but fails to address due to the sudden shift to an action film. There are many instances of South African citizens, some of whom are descendants of oppressed peoples in South Africa, stating their own prejudice towards the prawns. What does it say about human society that the oppressed are instantly willing to become the oppressors as soon as another race joins the hierarchy below them? This is unaddressed, as once the mockumentary is abandoned, these characters exit the narrative entirely, with no person of color left in the cast to address the issue. What does it even mean that this is told through mockumentary, besides being a convenient expositional tool and to give the introduction a veneer of authenticity; is it a commentary on the role of media in systematic oppression, and if so then what is it saying about media? That is not to say, however, that District 9 needs to tackle each and every one of these subjects. However, the fact that the film provides almost no commentary on the deeper issues behind systematic racism besides merely presenting the issues at hand speaks to a lack of depth that could have been easily fixed by a concentrated stylistic and narrative vision.

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The more traditional narrative of District 9, like the mockumentary elements, is well-executed on their own but feel somewhat betrayed by its lack of focused runtime at the beginning of the film. While Wikus’ character is significantly developed by his participation in the mockumentary introduction, his counterparts of Christopher and his son are only given partial runtime in this section, giving the audience very little to latch onto in terms of characterization and background. While Wikus grows heavily throughout the film, Christopher and his son remain static characters, with no recognizable character development. The friendship between Christopher and Wikus also seems somewhat hard to believe, as the film gives them barely any time to form a connection and show how, as Christopher says, they are “the same”. The antagonist of the film, a sadistic MNU officer who hunts prawns for sport, is given barely any screen time and as such feels more like a caricature of military abuse rather than a believable human, which hurts both the authenticity of the mockumentary and the emotional connections of the action sequences; imagine how satisfying the villain’s fate would be if we were given even more time to understand his cruel nature.

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Overall, District 9 serves as a well-executed lesson in the importance of tonal and narrative consistency. The film provides heavy traces of both a realistic and thought-provoking mockumentary as well as an emotional, edge-of-your-seat action flick, but never seems to fully reconcile the two.

 

Works Cited

Jones, M. (2020). Reading the rubbish dump as a heterotopia in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. Social Dynamics, 46(2), 297–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2020.1808306

 

Wallace, R. (2021). Documentary Style as Post-Truth Monstrosity in the Mockumentary Horror Film. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 38(6), 519–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2020.1780107