District 9

Okay, so I’m a little behind the times. That’s why I never got around around to seeing Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 until last night, when I watched it via Netflix streaming video. But take my advice–if you haven’t seen this one yet, don’t wait any longer. It’s magnificent.

You probably know the premise by now: In an alternate 1982, a massive but disabled alien mothership appeared in the skies over Johannesburg, South Africa, and sat there for three months until the government sent up a team to cut their way in and investigate. When they did, they discovered over a million insectoid aliens, weak and malnourished. The aliens were brought down to earth and placed in a temporary holding camp that soon turned into a permanent slum called District 9. When the job grew too big for the government to handle, the reins were given over to MNU, a transnational megacorporation. The aliens, unflatteringly nicknamed “prawns” (they look like Parktown prawns, large and pestilent crickets native to South Africa), never integrate into human society and speciesism is rampant and institutionalized. Now, over twenty years later, MNU has decided to relocate the entire alien population to “District 10,” a purpose-built tent city two hundred kilometers away from the city, just to get them out of the humans’ collective hair, and have given the job of spearheading the whole eviction to ineffectual bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe.

The parallels to apartheid (and, in particular, to the forced eviction of District 6 in the 1970s), are obvious and deliberate. This is no subtle allegory. But nevertheless, Blomkamp (who himself grew up in apartheid-era South Africa) is careful to avoid facile “the-humans-are-the-monsters” characterization. Unlike the Newcomers of Alien Nation, the prawns are utterly inhuman. Most of them are antisocial and violent, and we can see that full, peaceful integration is unlikely if not downright impossible.

At the conclusion of District 9, there are few happy endings, just like in real life. The ultimate fates of many characters, both human and alien, remain ambiguous. Roger Ebert’s review is right about the third act, which abandons a lot of the movie’s cerebral nature in favor of gunfights and explosions, but this is never to the movie’s actual detriment. Blomkamp demonstrates the greatest strength of genre fiction: its ability to confront raw political and emotional issues such as bigotry, culture clash and immigration without being bogged down by history. District 9, viewing the world through the lens of science fiction, is able to tackle these themes and explore them in detail.

I recommend this movie to anyone interested in grim, realistic science fiction with no obvious heroes or villains. I’ll be picking up the DVD soon, so I can explore the universe further through the added features.