District 9
Wikus is the real everyman. A dumb bureaucrat who keeps fucking up.
- Fuck up 1: Getting infected because he is dumb.
- Fuck up 2: Disabling Christopher Johnson right after he can escape.
He has no imagination, being stuck in the office all day means he sees the world as a series of forms.
The automatic assumption that everything is stolen, or that all prawns are criminals is par for the course for the bureaucrat. Even when that inflexibility can only hurt him, he charges ahead. The rules are not going to enforce themselves.
His reactions are priceless.
- Finding a piece of the spaceship hidden for 20 years: “This is a very high fine!”.
- Getting accused of doing the dirty deed with prawns: indignant denial, as if that is a fate worse that being a fugitive from medical experiments.
When the people at the restaurant run away, he states they are “legally obliged to serve him”, as being branded as contagious sub-human did not matter. As he tries to buy weapons from the gang, he keeps harping about illegal weapons, as if he wasn’t engaging in the very act he is indignant about.
Truly banal evil.
He gets redemption without death, but even that is a result of his impulsiveness. His last words are “Go on before I change my mind!”.
The small problems with this can all be chalked up to inexperience. This remains Bloomkamp’s best film, trumping Chappie but particularly Elysium.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.