Prawn Crackers, Anyone?

Even from the trailer, District 9 is clearly an allegory about racial discrimination and the injustice of segregation, ironically set in the home of apartheid, South Africa. It’s just set in a way cooler milieu of science fiction; here the disenfranchised is not just a race, it’s a species.

In previous movies the message is driven home when someone from the Establishment gets immersed in the world of the Outsiders (usually on the run because he’s falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit). His and the audiences’ eyes are opened to the humanity of the Outsiders, and the message “They’re not much different from us” is hammered home. But what if the Outsiders are literally aliens?

Happily this movie produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neil Bloomkamp is not just an allegory, but also a cracking summer movie. Even when the movie reveals the aliens to have human characteristics and values despite their cockroach-meets-shrimp exoskeletons and their clicking-and-computer-choppy-sounding voices, this message isn’t hammered into our heads. Instead, it’s tucked in with your edge-of-your-seat action sequences, bad-ass weaponry and a Terminator-like baddie. There’s nothing groundbreaking about the movie’s insight that humans can be the more cruel species; rather, the movie’s triumph is to weave that seamlessly within the summer movie framework.

And what a visceral movie! Those with faint of heart may look away at certain scenes involving organic projectiles and flying body parts both human and non-human. But the action and suspense are first-rate, and several times I was wriggling in my seat.

A few minor quibbles I had: the transition for “live footage” to documentary style hand-held camera work was pretty seamless, but it did pull me out of the experience of the movie for a few seconds. When the camera became a third-person omnipotent POV, certain narrative devices became too obvious (for example, how coincidental that Wikus, played brilliantly by the soon-to-cease-to-be-an-unknown Sharlto Copley, should “stumble” upon that all-important shack).

And I wonder what kind of movie it would have been if the Prawns (the derogatory term for the aliens) were really alien even in their objectives? That they motivations were even more inscrutable? That they didn’t have noble human values? But that’s something for another set of filmmakers to make.

Meanwhile, go watch District 9, but make sure you don’t go in on a full stomach. And don’t eat crustaceans afterwards.