Classic satire. Sci-fi as the conscience of the world. Great stuff!

Rating: 9/10 (4 October 2009)

I only saw this film because of a friend. I'm glad I did. Having read much classic sci-fi as a youngster(Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Vance, Dick etc.), I've had 40 years to become rather disenchanted with the whole genre. Shoot-em up, CGI schlock becomes rather tedious. Well-made schlock is still schlock. I blame George Lucas – Hollywood has been following his successfully banal formula ever since. Intelligent parodies or comedies like Ice Pirates and Red Dwarf gave some relief but sci-fi films became increasingly shallow, tiresome and predictable. District 9 has restored my faith.
Classic sci-fi always held up a mirror to the human condition, projecting our deepest fears and fantasies into fantastical worlds of the imagination. But always grounded in human culture and history. Inevitably and inescapably. District 9 is a satire in the classic tradition, like 'Starship Troopers' (book and film), and I congratulate its intelligence.
District 9 should not really work at all because it plays all too obviously on contemporary issues such as racism, apartheid and dislike of immigrants and stereotypes such as brutal South African police, Nigerian criminal gangs and evil arms corporations who are completely without scruple. Yet the film works very well indeed, mainly because the writing is so good, the underlying black humour (characteristic of many Japanese films but too subtle for many Westerners) is so apposite and the acting of the lead character Van De Merwe is Oscar-winning.
The shoot-em up CGI is, arguably, part of the parody on which the film rests. It pokes fun at what our popular culture has come to expect. It entertains but does so in an implicitly self-critical way. One feels regret for the violence, a major achievement in a film containing a fair amount of violence.
I suppose the spiritual forebears of District 9 would include Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and the 1985 film 'Enemy Mine'. Developing human empathy for aliens has a long and honourable history – easy when they are cute like E.T. but only made possible with the less attractive aliens of this film by giving them human personas. Anthropomorphism still rules OK! They may look revolting but under the skin, sorry carapace, they are just like us. Sci-fi has always had a problem in this area because we cannot imagine values, thinking and language beyond the human. Star Trek delegated the job to Spock and his mind meld technique. Vulcans can but humans cannot. The necessary cop-out, as in this film, is to make the aliens human under the skin. Hell, they even pay for sex with our women!
This is my only criticism of an otherwise excellent film which does illuminate aspects of the human condition at this moment in time. It should resonate with European audiences fending off Africans coming up from the South, South African audiences beset by Zimbabweans descending from the North, Americans facing imminent hispanicisation and many other cultures 'under threat' by 'tides' of 'illegals'. There is an amazing parallel between the aliens being evicted from their garbage dump existence and the recent action carried out by the French police near Calais.
District 9 does raise uncomfortable questions for our 'Human Rights Age'. Is our 'humane' response to the alien-human tide escaping poverty and oppression really as humane as we would like to believe? MNU is a state within a state - are multinationals too powerful for politicians to control? Does war generate more profit than peace? Hard questions. No easy answers.
This is a film about humans, not aliens. They simply act as a foil to our deepest anxieties and prejudices. The film could provide valuable source material for future historians of our time. Just like the film 'The Shape of Things to Come' (1936) highlighted the widespread fear of mass bombing by poison gas against which it was thought there was no defence. It's easy to forget that all British civilians were issued with gas masks before World War 2. Never used but a real factor in understanding the mentality of the time.
District 9 provides us with a useful mirror to view our own anxieties generated by the globalising age we live in. Few of us really want to look into this mirror. Sci-fi as the conscience of the world. Welcome rain after a long drought. Great stuff!