District 9
It's a world not far removed, a place where an unwanted alien presence mimics the plights found here at home. In the imagined world of "District 9," producer Peter Jackson and unheralded director Neill Blomkamp offer a challenge to both the senses and judgments, leaving viewers with shaky footing on an unsettling moral landscape.
It's surprising to note the level of mystery that surrounds this film, but not knowing what to expect only makes for a starker experience. The questions posed are a bit open-ended and gray, while the scenarios far-fetched only because principal characters are from another planet. But you need only replace space aliens with illegal immigrants to get a taste of what the filmmakers were reaching for, and you begin to realize the true ambition of this thought-provoking sci-fi thriller.
This doesn't mean that the filmmakers use their vision as a chance to lecture audiences. Instead, they cleverly use thrilling visual effects to pose vague "what-ifs" that the audience is left to decipher personally. Still, the references are inescapable, and the suggestive nudges are at times more than subtle.
It's no coincidence that the alien ship hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa, a land notorious for apartheid, segregation and intolerance. The unique twist of this particular alien story is that for the first time, the aliens are not the superior species. Instead, they are a directionless, leaderless mass that becomes an unbearable nuisance for human locals. Enter the first "hmm" moment of the movie.
The aliens are herded into slums, forced to live in substandard conditions that almost encourage crime as a means to survival. In this environment, the aliens become a parasitic entity, feeding off the dredges of humanity. News reports warn that within the slums, the prawns (the derogatory name given to the alien species to reflect their bottom-feeding tendencies) were becoming uncontrollable, and locals feared for their safety as the sprawl of alien degeneracy threatened to spread. The prawns were seen as incapable of being anything but leeches sucking life from society, tainting "good people" with their annihilative behavior. Sound familiar? It smacks of the prejudice spewed on ghettos and slums around the world; the imaginary vitriol directed toward the aliens is inspired by the same venom directed toward inhabitants of inner cities here. The viewer wonders if the inhabitants remain mired in squalor because of who/what they are, or because conditions make it impossible to be anything but. Yes, they were aliens ? that was the fantasy part. The gripping aspect of this perspective is the intolerance and abuse directed at every inhabitant of the slums, a negative perception that was shown to be a false assumption of character as the movie develops.
Another eyebrow-raising theme brought up in the movie is a favorite theme in the sci-fi genre: the secretive and subversive government/military. Add to this familiar evil the crowd-whipping, sensationalist media, and the viewer is given a sense of how the public's opinion can be thwarted and shaped according to the whim of the powers that be. The military is concerned only with the technology of the alien weapons; the government is concerned only with using the aliens as guinea pigs. Together, the cruel experimentation exposes the inhumanity displayed by the human hosts. The media is used as a tool, a cattle prod that cloaks the truth and only reveals what needs to be known to elicit a direct reaction. When mercenaries are sent into the slums to deliver eviction notices, the true intention of alien "relocation" is never revealed, but disguised as bureaucratic policy.
And how can anyone ignore the metamorphosis of main character Wikus Van De Merwe, a meek, clueless government servant who shares the baseless hatred toward the prawns but soon becomes more respectable by becoming