District 9 becomes a concentration camp
If you wanted to comment on the nature of power on our planet, wouldn’t your
first thought be to hang a giant space ship over Johannesburg? Writer/director
Neill Blomkamp has done just that in his new film “District 9.” He ignores the
world’s larger cities to focus on the land of Apartheid. And though South Africa
may be the illustration, the movie could have been set wherever people are
oppressed.
When the
local citizenry realizes, after two decades, that the aliens in the space ship
are malnourished, they decide to help them by bringing them to earth to a
refugee settlement called District 9. The physical needs of the aliens, being
different from humans, begin to stamp them not only as different, but dangerous.
Result? The settlement quickly turns into a sprawling slum of tin shacks,
rubble, and violence. And so we know quickly why Mr. Blomkamp chose
Johannesburg.
Threatened by
the alien nature of the beings, the humans decide to move them to District 10,
an area at a safe remove from the city where the people of Johannesburg will not
have to suffer nearness to their strange culture. District 10 becomes a
concentration camp.
And now we
meet Multi-National United, a private security firm bearing an uncanny likeness
to firms that have unleashed their bad deeds in Iraq. The firm has not one iota
of interest in the humans or the aliens, now called prawns, who are now being
forcibly transferred from District 9 to their more isolated home. MNU sees only
their weaponry, and they want the secret.
Wilkus Van De
Merwe (Sharito Copley), a feckless employee of Multi-National United is mediocre
in mind and body but driven by outsized ambition. Put in charge of the transfer
of the aliens by his callous father- in-law, he finds the fluid that is the
secret to the aliens’ assault power. Splashed with fluid, he starts to turn into
a prawn. The oppressor has become the oppressed.
Blomkamp tugs
the heartstrings with an appealing alien father and son who become allies with
Van De Merwe. Gradually, we root for the humane trio. The villain, the big,
white MNU boss who cares only about the technology of weapons and destruction of
the Prawns, is a symbol for so many of the villains we have had to watch in
recent years. He is the ugly brute destroying innocents.
I realized
early on that I like the lessons I need to learn when they come straight at me.
My personal problem with District 9 is that science fiction doesn’t hold much
appeal, and alien creatures, created deliberately to challenge our aesthetics,
don’t win me over even when they have tender hearts – except naturally, for the
toddler Prawn and his dad. And this of course leaves me sunk in my seat thinking
th at I, like so many others, must be guilty of responding only to creatures who
are familiar. And perhaps that is Blomkamp’s big test for us all.
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