District 9: A Let Down?

District 9 promises to be an interesting, new direction for Science Fiction. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, and based on his short film Alive In Joberg, District 9 did break some very new ground. It opens with grity documentary like footage about the ghettoization of a new alien race that had landed on Earth.

What the film does right is that the events take place over a country that has a history of prejudice and war, a severe lack of resources and really addresses the top of racist propaganda. You see people, both black and white, talking about how the government needs to help Humans not “Prawns”, the derrogetory name for the alien species. The lack of resources being fought over is, in my belief, the core of racist propaganda. It always comes down to “us” and “them” fighting over limited resources.

Also it references historical events. MNU’s eviction and relocation of the aliens is based on District Six, a former inner-city residential area in Cape Town, South Africa. The district was declared a “whites only” area by the apartheid government in 1966 and the population of 60,000 forcibly relocated to Cape Flats, 25 kilometres away during the following years.

I really liked the way that we saw the aliens obsess over cat food, and later, we see a human who is pushed to an extreme do the same.

What they did wrong with this film, how ever, is this. We simply don’t care about the aliens. It is stated that all of the aliens, with exception of one, are chaos loving, criminals who are obsessed with violence. This is a form of racial propaganda. What I don’t like is that we only see one alien stand up and do the right thing repeatedly. He was clearly a comander of the alien race and suggests that people in the ghettos around the world are simply stupid and lazy. I think what the film wanted to do was show that violence is human nature and its true for all of us, but this point fell very flat in the film.

The most remarkable failure in the film is the super large plot hole. Early on we learn that part of the ship falls to the earth and the entire plot of the last portion of the movie is that, if the aliens can get enough fluid (found inside their own technology) they could take a small ship, the thing that fell, and get it back to their main ship so they can go home. How is this a plot hole? Well, it’s pretty easy. If they were able to extract this liquid fuel from their own technology, as they do in the film, why were they not able to do so when everything was still on the space ship? Why does it take over 20 years to get a small canister full?

In the end, District 9 is an action movie with some gruesome violence, some disturbing imagery and one hell of a premis. It falls short of its goals but it gave it one hell of a try. I believe the failure is not on the part of the director but on the big hollywood production company who seemed to insist on trying to turn the film into an action adventure story rather than a documentary about ghettoization and prejudice.