Movie Recommendation: District 9, A Sci-Fi Exploration of Racism's Universality

by: David Sirota

Wed Aug 19, 2009 at 09:15

The plot summary is straightforward and also ingenious: Instead of following the typical War of the Worlds script which has alien invaders coming to conquer Earth, District 9 reverses it: the aliens find themselves stranded on Earth and subsequently subjugated by humans. The filmmakers create this story by setting up the alien craft as a slave ship lost at sea - basically, the ship is filled with worker drones, gets lost on some routine intergalactic journey, and ends up drifting over Johannesburg, South Africa. When, after 3 months, humans break into the craft, they find the aliens starving and weak, and decide to "save" them by relocating them to a section of Johannesburg known as District 9.

Twenty years after the ship appeared, District 9 has become your standard refugee camp - impoverished, high crime and lots of violence. The South Africans - both white and black - have ghettoized the crustacean-looking aliens into a new apartheid situation, barring them from leaving or moving around. And as the movie begins, the goal of District 9's corporate administrators (led by a guy named Wikus, whose hairstyle and moustache is clearly intended to evoke a Hitler image) is to relocate the million aliens to a  concentration camp 200 miles outside the city, because the human inhabitants of Johannesburg are fed up with them.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm not going to divulge what happens in the movie, but if you are one of those people who doesn't want to know anything about a film before seeing it, don't read on.

The company, we discover, is less a private prison corporation looking to keep profiting off South Africa's District 9 contract than it is a business hoping to become the most powerful arms dealer in history. And Wikus, because he has accidentally discovered how to fuse human and alien DNA, is their key to unlocking the alien weaponry for human use.

Of course, they have to kill him and experiment on his body parts to figure out all that they need to figure out. And when Wikus hears this, he understandably freaks out - and escapes. The rest of the movie is his journey into hiding in District 9.

I won't offer up any more plot points out of respect for those who don't want the movie spoiled. But what I will say is that this is just a fantastic film on every level.

First and foremost, the graphics are just amazing - and not in a cheesy, glitzy kind of way. Typical alien movies like Signs or The Abyss immediately die the moment they actually show the aliens, because the aliens end up looking so fake. District 9, by contrast, shows the aliens and it works really well. It is able to achieve this by shooting scenes that are mostly real (he shot on location in a township in Soweto), and having the special effects/CGI comprise only small parts of large vistas. That obscures the CGI-ness of the special effects to the naked eye. The result is the most "real" alien movie I've ever seen.

Even more important than the visuals, though, is the plot. By setting the movie in South Africa, the refugee camp/anti-alien racism is a powerful allegory about the universality of oppression. One of the film's most powerful messages (and there are a number of messages in this movie) is that even groups that have been oppressed can themselves turn into oppressors. In the movie, South Africa's black population is just as anti-alien as its white population. In real life, we have plenty of examples of the same kind of thing. As just one of many examples, in Israel, some (but certainly not all or most) Jews - despite their own history experiencing oppression - express extremely racist views about Arabs.

I really can't recommend this movie enough - along with Moon, it's the best of the sci-fi productions this year, and probably since The Matrix came out (and that's saying a lot because like Moon, it was made on a shoe-string budget). In fact, I'm guessing that because the movie was so good and because it leaves a really compelling cliff hanger, District 9 has a real chance to be as big and as good (if not better) series than The Matrix itself.

ADDENDUM: Check out the movie's website here - and also check out its mini-sites. As I noted, District 9 was made on a very small budget for the size and scope of its plot. It therefore had to rely on a viral marketing strategy, which involved the web. As you'll see, they did some really innovative things.