Neil Blomkamp announced himself today in 2009 with the South African sci-fi and satirical body horror gem District 9. To say that he owes his existence to MasterChef and Peter Jackson.
District 9 takes a familiar concept of aliens visiting us and gives it a frustratingly realistic twist. A spacecraft appears over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1982. Strange-looking aliens are greeted and nicknamed “Prawns” because of their appearance. Fast forward to 2010 and the alien population is a forgotten novelty, left to live in a run-down ghetto with a heavy military presence.
The neighborhood in the film is based on a real South African neighborhood of Cape Town that was demolished by the apartheid government in 1966 to make way for whites. The plot parallels in District 9 aren’t subtle, but they’re effective in this context.
One day, a munitions company arrives to forcefully evacuate shrimp from the ghetto. The eviction is led by Director Wikos van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley in his first role). Wikos is condescending, quietly obnoxious, and a bit of an asshole in general. He is in no way sensitive to the fate of aliens. Instead, it’s an allegory of how the world views these aliens – exactly the kind you’d like to see their worldview turned upside down.
And this is what happens. Wikus is exposed to a mysterious alien chemical and begins to completely transform into something else. Now depending on the race he was running, he could see how life went over the fence, well…let’s just say there’s no nice lesson learned here. Wikus is cursed the second time he enters District 9.
From Master Chief to Prawn Blaster
Credit: Tristar Pictures
District 9 was born after the failure of a movie based on Blomkamp’s Halo video game. Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) was a producer on the project, and rather than let Blomkamp sit his hands, he offered him $30 million to do whatever he wanted. What Blomkamp wanted became District 9, and the rest is history.
The film was subsequently nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was the same year as The Hurt Locker v. The Avatar Slug Festival, however, ended awards night in disappointment.
Blomkamp has gone on to make several films with a similar dark futuristic aesthetic. This included Elysium with Matt Damon and Chubby with Hugh Jackman. Then Blomkamp experimented with the concepts of doing FX for Oats Studio. A studio had it started in 2017. After all these years, Blomkamp finally came back to the idea of making a video game movie, and it ended up being an unexpected adaptation of the PlayStation racing simulator Gran Turismo.
The director also found himself in the world of real-time video games in the year 2022, when he joined Gunzilla Games to help create the battle royale game Off the Grid.
Blomkamp and Copley revealed that they are writing a script for a sequel titled District 10 in 2021. The story will move from South Africa to the US, but development appears to have stalled. Even if we don’t get this sequel, District 9 is still a great stand-alone story full of ingenuity, wit, and feeling.
