Twenty years ago a spaceship appeared in the sky over Johannesburg. When, after three months of it hanging there in the sky, no aliens descended from it to make contact, the South African military decided it was time to do so themselves. Soldiers cut their way into the huge vessel to discover a heaving mass of starving and leaderless extraterrestrials.
So begins District 9 , Neill Blomkamp’s impressive feature film directorial debut. No information is given as to why the ship has arrived, where it came from or why it is suspended over Johannesburg and not, say, New York, but the location with its recent penchant for segregation and racial conflict is the perfect backdrop for the story that follows.
This is a second outing for Blomkamp’s aliens. Given the unflattering name, ‘prawns’ by their human neighbours, we first met them his 2005 short sci-fi project, ‘Alive in Joberg’. The full length feature picks up the story twenty years after the arrival and some time after the prawns have worn out their welcome.
There is nothing remotely cute about these aliens; no E.T., or humanoid green men these. Their insectile appearance is as much reminiscent of cockroaches as it is of prawns, and their habit of crawling over the city dump scavenging is unpleasant to say the least. While this year’s other major alien movie, The Fourth Kind is marketed as being based on fact, District 9 makes no such claim yet is creepily realistic.
Their presence on the outskirts of the city becomes the focus of the simmering human populace, and plans are made to evict the prawns and rehouse them at a greater distance from people. Finally, it seems, South Africa has a cause that unites all of its people; a group separated and made different by more than the color of their skin. United they stand in hatred and distrust of the newcomers.
While it looks like being one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters, movie goers in Nigeria may miss it all together. Information Minister, Dora Akunyili has stated that District 9 is not welcomed in Nigeria and that she has given an order to the Nigerian film and video censors’ board that it must not be shown at any public cinema.
The slum, in which the aliens live, District 9, of the title, is a magnet for crime and gangsters, the worst of which is Nigerian, Obesandjo. In one scene he eats the arm of an alien and in another he is attempting to cannibalize the arm of the film’s main protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe, in order to gain a special power that he possesses. Nigerian women are also shown in a bad light in the movie and Ms. Akunyili further objected to the similarity between gangster Obesandjo’s name and that of former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo.
Of all sci-fi movies, this one sadly strikes a more likely note on the probable reaction of any global government to an influx of intergalactic illegal immigrants than any before has done. The prawns are insectile and ugly. They seem brutish and uncivilised – but they are not as monstrous and frightening as Ridley Scott’s Alien. Though redeeming qualities can be seen in one of the prawns, he will never be as adorable as Spielberg’s E.T.
Though their reason for coming to earth is not given in the movie, it seems perhaps that they are the dregs of a society gone wrong, packed up and shipped off to become somebody else’s problem. They have no leaders to guide them and not enough fuel to get home. Thrust upon the mercy of a different race, Blomkamp’s aliens tested our ability to integrate and understand. And we failed.
