Try as we might, we cannot escape the atrocities we have wrought on our fellow man. For every attempt we have made to bury the past in the hopes we can pretend it didn’t happen, someone else will attempt to preserve those experiences so that we can not forget what we did and perhaps even learn from it. This comes in the form of museums, books, and even in our fiction. Star Trek often would paint in allegory, using science fiction to tackle major issues like racism, overpopulation, genetics, and even had a movie that focused on the forced relocation of a race of people for the “better good” of the rest of humanity. This allegorical storytelling is one of the reasons I love Star Trek so much.
One of our particularly darker chapters in history is the apartheid era in South Africa. During apartheid, an area of Cape Town was designated District Six, where people of color were banned entirely. As this area had a significant population of Black, Asian, and Indian people, those non-white people were forcibly relocated, losing their homes and possessions. This ultimately failed, and the area, renamed Zonnebloem, has gone mostly barren and unoccupied to this day. This is reminiscent of yet another forced relocation, that of the Jews in Poland and other areas into Ghettos by the Nazis. Millions of people were affected by this injustice in Cape Town.
Neill Blomkamp was thinking about District Six when he crafted his film, District 9. But that is not where the germ of this project initially began. Initially, producer Peter Jackson was planning to make an adaptation based on the Halo video game franchise. But due primarily to Halo’s intellectual rights holder, Microsoft, demanding too much from potential studios, that project never got off the ground. Props had already been manufactured for the Halo film, and so they pivoted to an alternate idea, District 9, which could heavily utilize those existing props. This would be Blomkamp’s first feature project after helming commercials and short films, so he had a lot to prove.
He co-wrote the script with his wife, Terri Tatchell, and chose to film the movie in his original home country of South Africa. He also fell back on some filmmaking devices from his short films, specifically Alive in Joburg, including the documentary-style use of staged interviews and news reports to give the film a real-world feel. It also allowed for guerrilla-style filmmaking, especially in the first act as it is meant to look like on-the-scene reporting.
We are following Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a bumbling, awkward bureaucrat working for the MNU Department of Alien Affairs. Wikus has just been promoted and assigned to oversee the forced relocation of over two million aliens residing in District 9 near Johannesburg, South Africa. These aliens, insect-like creatures, arrived on Earth in 1982 when their ship entered our atmosphere and hovered over Johannesburg. When humans forced their way into the alien ship, they found the aliens starving and weak. The aliens were allowed to live in District 9, where it became a slum. Now, many years later, the populace of Cape Town wants the aliens, nicknamed Prawns, removed under the pretense that it isn’t safe for them to be there anymore. Wikus’ job is to get each of the aliens to sign an eviction notice and then relocate them all many miles away where they will be out of sight of the general populace.
Meanwhile, three aliens named Christopher Johnson, his young son CJ, and his friend Paul are digging through a District 9 garbage dump in search of alien technology. Christopher has spent two decades synthesizing fuel from their contents in an effort to power up a small ship that can, when reattached to the main ship, rescue the remaining aliens from Earth. When Wikus arrives with his eviction order for Christopher to sign, he stumbles upon the canister of fuel and accidentally sprays himself in the face. In the chaos, Paul is killed by one of the MNU mercenaries, and Wikus injures his left arm. Shortly afterwards, his left arm begins to mutate into a Prawn. This makes him a target of MNU, who see that this mutation allows Wikus to utilize the alien weaponry which is gene-encoded to only the Prawns. It also makes him a target of Nigerian warlords who practice the ritual of eating Prawns, believing it will give them their powers. As the mutation progresses, Wikus finds himself being treated less and less like a human, giving him a new perspective on things.
The basic morality lesson being presented here is nothing new. Being forced to live like the other half has been around since the early days of cinema. We saw this in films like Gentlemen’s Agreement, where Gregory Peck gets a crash course in the everyday life of Jewish people. It’s been parodied to death too, with one of the funniest examples being Eddie Murphy on SNL disguising himself as a white man and finding that the world is so much more welcoming to white people. Enemy Mine forced two men on opposite sides of a war into relying on each other to survive and thus being able to put aside their cultural and racial differences. Even Dances With Wolves tackled this issue with the Native Americans.
Wikus begins the film cocky and sure of himself, treating the Prawns as if they were vermin to be trampled on. The worst scene showcasing this mentality is when he stumbles upon a nest of developing baby Prawns and casually disconnects their feeding tubes, joking about how they have just witnessed an abortion. This is disturbing and evil, and we would hate him a lot more were he not so charismatic. The film cuts to interviews with him as well as members of his family, making sure that we can see the humanity there, juxtaposing it with his callous actions while in District 9. It’s important early on that we see this humanity, too, because after the mutations begin, those around him will stop seeing that humanity. He will cease to be a person and be relegated to something that can be used to turn a profit.
The Prawns are intentionally designed to look hostile and violent. Instead, they are far more humane than the people we meet. The humans are seen as hostile and exploitative, selling food to the Prawns at excessively high prices, knowing there is very little the aliens can do about it. They also conduct highly brutal experiments on the Prawns. The film never lets us see the average citizen of Johannesburg, just military personnel, employees of MNU, and Nigerian warlords. We get an idea that not all of the populace is like this small sample just from the reaction received when these deadly experiments are exposed to the public, but this is only briefly mentioned in the finale. From what we see, it makes it appear like the whole world feels hostile against these aliens.
And that is one of the weak points of this plot. It’s too contained. The real-world reality is that if an alien spaceship began hovering over anywhere on the planet, it would become a worldwide event with all major nations getting involved. This film never really addresses the global ramifications of such an event. It narrows the scope of things. Blomkamp was planning a sequel called District 10, and perhaps that would have opened things up globally. As of this writing, this sequel has yet to go into production, so we still don’t have those answers.
The connections to real-world atrocities helped this film hammer home its themes, and despite its shaky production, it managed to ignite an audience following in its initial theatrical release. It also became a rare science fiction film to score high at the Academy Awards, receiving four nominations, winning none. It also received negative backlash from the Nigerian government, who opposed their representation in the film, relegating their people to warlords and cannibals. This resulted in the film being banned in Nigeria. There was also controversy over the trope of the “white savior.” These are valid criticisms that mar an otherwise amazing experience. But this film transcends those weaknesses in the script and remains a memorable allegory of atrocities that happened within my lifetime. This helps make these real events more understandable and poignant, especially during this time in American history where it seems like these kinds of things are happing all over again.
Academy Awards Nominations:
Best Picture: Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham
Best Adapted Screenplay: Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
Best Film Editing: Julian Clarke
Best Visual Effects: Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, and Matt Aitken
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Release Date: August 14, 2009
Running Time: 112 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, David James, Vanessa Haywood, Mandla Gaduka, Kenneth Nkosi, Eugene Khumbanyiwa, Louis Minnaar, and William Allen Young
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
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