"District 9" is one of the most original and tasteful SF films I have seen. It is set in an alternate timeline in director Neill Blomkamp's native South Africa where insectoid aliens have landed in a giant ship. However, they are not portrayed as evil creatures, trying to take over or destroy the human race and their planet. On the contrary, they arrive ill and malnourished, as refugees, and are forced to live in inhumane conditions and poverty in a slum, isolated from the rest of the (Johannesburg) population. They are derogatively called "prawns" (derived not from the shellfish but from the Parktown Prawn, a giant cricket native to Johannesburg). Here is the rest of the story without revealing too much: When a special agent is accidentally exposed to a mysterious alien substance, he finds himself a hunted man and this suddenly changes the entire perspective.
The feature is based on an earlier short film by Blomkamp entitled "Alive in Joburg" (watch here) and it has documentary and found-footage elements integrated into more of a cinematic hollywood-like formula. Blomkamp had been working on an adaptation of the video game "Home" and when this failed, Peter Jackson took him under his wing and allowed him to "go crazy with the film" he knew, he would want to make.
Even though they had a lower budget, I believe they made one of the most outstanding SF films of the last years, one that can be admired from a technical (the CGI is amazing!), dramatic (great acting), narrative (with a few drawbacks), and educational point of view (the movie tackles issues like xenophobia, the corruptive potential of power, the inability of people to learn from history or to see beyond their own side of the table, the dark side of human capabilities when confronted with despair, media manipulation, poverty and exploitation of the weak etc. The metaphorical connotations cannot be ignored: starting from the apartheid history (the signs of the movie and of the preceeding marketing campaign reminded me so much of the toilet segregation apartheid signs) up to recent issues: Interestingly enough, the film shoot coincided with attacks and killings of Zimbabwean refugees living in the shanty towns.
I believe that the movie tries to show that unless one is forced to see through the other's eyes, one might never understand the limits of one's own perspective.
"MNU Spreads Lies" - poster source, source 1, source 2
Check out the D9 website.
Watch the trailer:
4 comments:
I also loved it, a breath of fresh air :)
I am hoping for district 10 (three years later :)
The poster is great, did not find that one ;) Is media preparing us for something? Maybe just for the sequel he he.
i love it! it's from the "MNU spreads lies" site (see the link in the post), a quite weird one, actually. but i like it, because it allows you to read between the lines if you have seen the movie: i mean, why did they have to collect signatures to deport them if they treated them like animals (or even worse) anyway. why did they have to worry about ethics? it's blablabla. as always.
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