District 9

Not all scifi needs to have a message and certainly some people out there would prefer it didn't.  But I'm not one of them.  District 9 is very much sci fi with a message.  It's also one of my favorite films in recent memory.


It's interesting to note that even at it's origin, science fiction almost always explored social themes of the day.  War of the worlds (while not the first sci fi story, I'd make an argument towards it being the first populist scifi tale) was an indictment of british colonialism.  The Time Machine talked about Wealth Disparity.  We and 1984 used dystopian visions of the future to discuss the social ills that bothered their authors.

District 9 in turn uses aliens to examine rascism in general and apartheid in particular.

Set in Johannesburg, it tells the tale of a spaceship coming to a halt above the south african city.  To the surprise of everyone, instead of containing aliens that bring enlightenment and hope or even doom and apocalypse, it instead contains refugee's, a group of aliens from a caste system lacking a leader (the director has suggested in an interview that these leaders had died in some form of catastrophic event prior to the ships arrival)

Humanity's response is tragically predictable.  A temporary refugee camp swiftly becomes a permanent slum and the aliens are faced with the inhumanity that we humans so regularly treat each other with.  At the opening of the film the camp is being forcibly relocated to one with even worse conditions than their present slum.

It's here we meet Wikus, a bumbling beaurocrat who perfectly embodies the banal evil that so often gets excused with the phrase "I was just doing my job."  When, early in the film, we see him destroying a next of the aliens eggs (even joking about abortions as he does so) he becomes deeply hateable, doubly so when we know that his actions are based on horrific facts.

When he is dosed with a mysterious alien liquid that begins to transform into one of the creatures, we see a path of such instant karma that it eventually begins to redeem him.  What follows is a heartbreaking but fantastically entertaining film that's half action film and half social commentary.  It rarely pulls its punches, but manages to strike a perfect balance between entertainment and honesty.

Absolutely one of the best films of the last decade.  Check it out.

Posted in: District 9, Movie, Movie Review