District 9

(possible spoilers.)

If you haven’t seen District 9 and know nothing at all about it I will provide a brief synopsis:

“Director Neill Blomkamp teams with producer Peter Jackson for this tale of extraterrestrial refugees stuck in contemporary South Africa. It's been 28 years since the aliens made first contact, but there was never any attack from the skies, nor any profound technological revelation capable of advancing our society. Instead, the aliens were treated as refugees. They were the last of their kind, and in order to accommodate them, the government of South Africa set up a makeshift home in District 9 as politicians and world leaders debated how to handle the situation. As the humans begin to grow wary of the unwelcome intruders, a private company called Multi-National United (MNU) is assigned the task of controlling the aliens. But MNU is less interested in the aliens' welfare than attempting to understand how their weaponry works. Should they manage to make that breakthrough, they will receive tremendous profits to fund their research. Unfortunately, the highly advanced weaponry requires alien DNA in order to be activated. When MNU field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is exposed to biotechnology that causes his DNA to mutate, the tensions between the aliens and the humans intensifies. Wikus is the key to unlocking the alien's technology, and he quickly becomes the most wanted man on the planet. Ostracized and isolated, Wikus retreats to District 9 in a desperate bid to shake his dogged pursuers.”

It is a sci/fi film, yet it is also very relevant to the present. This is really how sci/fi should be. Science fiction should reveal things about humanity as it is. If the sci/fi is good, this revelation will be through aliens or space or strange technology etc. I enjoy most sci/fi, but the sort that makes me think is by far the best. Films such as the first Matrix, V for Vendetta, Equilibrium, Children of Men and now District 9 fit into that category for me.

In District 9, I was shown man’s inhumanity. As soon as the protagonist became useful, he was considered an experiment and nothing else mattered. Not his pain, his wife, or the lives of the aliens. The aliens themselves were considered test experiments. They were quite literally torn apart in the hope of finding the secret to operate their technology. So I was also shown the greed of humans, the disregard for others, the selfishness that runs so deep in all of us.

District 9 was very real in regards to the protagonist. He was not a macho-man, he was no hero. He did not ‘beat the bad guys’ whoever they might be. He was simply a man. Not even a very likable one. He went though a lot, but he dealt with it as a real person would. Not as an iconic action hero. He made heaps of mistakes, and only learned from them slightly. He was selfish and endured excruciating pain like a human. That is, he screamed and cried and panicked.

Side note: the actor in the lead role never acted before this film and his believability was astounding.

Many people will watch this film and find it to be good entertainment. There’s plenty of action and explosions and violence and gore. There are neat computer generated effects and creatures. But I look at it though a different lens. I know that there are similar slums all over Africa and the world, in fact, the movie was filmed in an actual shanty-town. I know that there have been, and still are people treated much like the aliens were in the movie. People who are degraded and discriminated against. People who are given derogatory nicknames and thought of as a worthless nuisance. This was a look at human history: apartheid, Nazi Germany, the pogroms of Native Americans. But it was also the present as seen in Darfur, and the future as it could be.

The move does end on a slightly hopeful note, though it does not fully resolve. It’s rather like real life in that way also.