The aliens of District 9 may have landed in South Africa, but they were born in Canada.
The startlingly realistic effects of the science-fiction thriller are the handiwork of Vancouver studios Image Engine, The Embassy and Zoic, all of which contributed to the extraterrestrial "prawns" and their bio-mechanized weaponry.
The Canadian connection isn't entirely surprising since director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp lives in Vancouver.
So when Weta Digital -- producer Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based effects house -- was unable to complete the District 9 workload, the first-time feature director turned to the technicians he knew from his own background as a computer animator, visual-effects designer and commercial helmer.
"Weta couldn't handle it because they were working on James Cameron's Avatar, which has consumed all of New Zealand," Blomkamp says of the Titanic director's Christmastime 3D epic.
In the end, while Weta contributed the crippled alien mothership that hovers over Johannesburg, the Vancouver outfits provided the bulk of the film's 600-plus visual-effects shots.
For the 29-year-old Blomkamp, District 9 marks both a professional -- and intensely personal -- triumph.
Back in 2006, Jackson -- the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- selected Blomkamp to helm the film adaptation of the massively popular video game Halo, which Jackson's Wingnut studio was producing. After months of work on the project, though, the movie collapsed -- with some reports suggesting Blomkamp had let the budget balloon out of control.
"Complete bulls---," he says now.
Disappointed but determined to work with the young filmmaker, Jackson offered to produce Blomkamp's next project -- and shield him from similar studio interference. Thus was born the buzzed-about District 9, which -- with a cast of unknowns and a paltry $30-million budget -- is earning raves from critics and fanboys alike.
"I feel incredibly lucky to have a renowned filmmaker like Peter Jackson fighting for me in my corner," he tells Sun Media. "I'd call him my guardian angel."
What distinguishes -- and elevates -- District 9 from the typical Hollywood blockbuster is that, for all its aliens and action, it's also a political allegory. Transformers 2, it's not.
Set two decades after a spacecraft appeared over Johannesburg, the story picks up with the extraterrestrials segregated, exploited and abused.
The parallels to Apartheid are as unavoidable as they are intentional. Blomkamp grew up in South Africa until the age of 18 when his family moved to Vancouver. "The story is a product of its setting."
And there are further parallels as well to, among other modern-day controversies, the war in Iraq. District 9's villains aren't the alien refugees but the private military contractors who terrorize and experiment on the extraterrestrials in the hopes of profiteering from their advanced technology.
Still, Blomkamp struggled to avoid making a movie that was too "self-serious and ponderous."
Eventually the Vancouver Film School grad -- with a script co-penned by Terri Tatchell -- believes he achieved a balance between satire, statement and a "Hollywood ride" with thrilling action and characters you're invested in. Key to the latter is the performance of Sharlto Copley as the bureaucrat who becomes an unwitting alien ally. Remarkably, Copley, an old friend of Blomkamp, had never acted before District 9.
"I'm more interested in seeing what happens to him than what happens to me," the director says.
What's probably not next for the director are further flirtations with big-budget studio productions a la Halo.
"Unless you're Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott, you're probably not going to be able to do what you want to do, so I don't understand what the point would be," he says, musing about establishing a "Pacific Northwest film centre" a la Robert Rodriguez's Texas-based Troublemaker compound or Jackson's own New Zealand-based independent-of-Hollywood empire. "I'd just like to keep doing what I'm doing."
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