I just saw District 9 yesterday, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by the much acclaimed filmmaker Peter Jackson.  I’ve seen many sci-fi movies over the years, but few could compare to the real life humanitarian struggles that define this groundbreaking movie.  D9 is the first sci-fi film where the viewer is actually put in the scenario of “what if this really happened?” and the viewer does not sit back in his seat and say “yeah right!”.  The movie starts off with the story of the alien ship coming to a stall over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa (an obvious reference to the stain of apartheid and the separate but equal precedent).  The alien ship becomes a floating abyss over the city, derelict and full of over a million aliens that are now stranded on a foreign planet.  Enter the real life logistical and humanitarian concerns (new meaning is given to the word humanitarian) such as getting over a million aliens (who are derogatively referred to as “prawns” by the humans in reference to the ocean’s bottom feeders) off the mother ship which was unsustainable and then establishing some kind of settlement for them.

The settlement that eventually becomes the prawns’ home is more of a shanty town ghetto rife with crime lords and squalor.  The gritty setting developed by Blomkamp and Jackson is very reminiscent of a lawless Iraq or other Middle Eastern setting, that’s not a coincidence.  Enter Multi-National United (or MNU as they are referred to) a ruthless multi-national corporation that previously specialized in military weaponry and is now hell bent on acquiring alien weapons.  MNU begins conducting raids on District 9 to evict the prawns to a concentration style camp hundreds of miles away from Johannesburg, however their real aim is to confiscate as much of the prawns weaponry as possible which is worth billions to them.  This is a direct reference to the advent of private military contractors, such as Blackwater, employed by the US in Iraq.  These contractors operate with complete immunity and are indeed above the law.  MNU operates the same way, above the law and with brute force.

Our main character in the film is Wickus, a mid level bureaucrat whose father-in-law is the big wig at MNU who put him in charge of the massive eviction/relocation effort.  He becomes infected with the fluid that powers the mother ship and begins to transform into the one thing he despises the most, the prawns.  Throughout the rest of the film Wickus finds his inner humanity when faced with becoming “one of them”.  He meets a prawn he had earlier tried to evict named Christopher Johnson who is no dumb bottom feeder as Wickus and MNU have come to view the aliens, nothing more than a nuisance to be dealt with as one would a cockroach infestation.  At one point during his evictions Wickus comes across a shack full of gestating alien eggs.  The audience watches as Wickus gleefully calls in reinforcements to torch the place, then points out that it sounds like popcorn when the eggs are being torched.

The films true heart comes out when Wickus, who by this time is half prawn half human, and Christopher, as well as his computer animated son, join together to help each other.  Wickus wants Christopher to cure him and make him human again, and Christopher wants the canister of fluid that powers his ship that took him more than 20 years to collect.  The character of Christopher contains many biblical references that are hard to ignore.  For instance, when Christopher sees the torturous medical experiments being performed on his people, not only is he shocked and horrified like no human character in the film, he is determined to rescue his people from the yoke of human oppression.  Christopher promises Wickus to return in 3 years time (according to biblical references Christ rose again in 3 days) to cure him and make him human again and save his people.  Christopher’s spaceship is also cross shaped and ascends to the mother ship via a beam of light, another hard to miss biblical reference.

Unlike countless other formula summer sci-fi flicks (Transformers! Michael Bay I’m talking to you! Stop making movies!!), the aliens are not necessarily the bad guys in this film.  It is our own human prejudice, our fears and our greed that takes center stage as the real works of evil.  With the Academy Awards increasing its Best Picture category to 10 nominees this year, it’s hard to imagine how D9 could be left out of the mix.  It is nothing less then the reinvention of sci-fi for the 21^st century!