District 9 is more subtle than you might think

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 2009)

District 9 is a movie to think about. The first (and second) time I watched District 9, I wasn't quite sure what to think. I came at it from the p.o.v. of a science fiction fan, and I thought some of the SF elements were not entirely thought through. But I thought some more about it, and things started to gel.
Movies have been made before that people thought were about racism. I'm thinking of a brilliant film like Pleasantville, which on the face of it seems to be about race, but was much more complex underneath that surface. And I'm thinking of another brilliant 1998 film like Bulworth, where race was used to symbolize rich and poor. District 9, at first, seems not simply to be about race, but about xenophobia generally, and the plight of refugees especially. Penetrating deeper, this appearance however, while effective and admirable, is also deceptive. District 9 is one film that actually IS about racism. This is a South African film. The aliens in it arrived 28 years ago, when the inhuman Apartheid system was still in effect.
So what is this film saying? Get this: It is using aliens to explain to us that there is still effective Apartheid in South Africa today. The aliens symbolize the black South Africans, and how they are still ostracized from much of common/white society and kept in crime-infested and corruption-ridden areas. Having no future and no hope and no voice. That's also why, in the film, the Nigerians are Nigerians - they couldn't be South Africans, because the *aliens* are the South Africans.
The bio-fluid used to power the space-ship represents the life-force and will to live that the black South Africans have lost. In the film, it must be the catastrophic loss of almost all their bio-fluid that led to the big ship's crash in the first place, and to the poor condition of the aliens inside it. The alien technology represents cultural substance; it is a beautiful symbol of all that we have to learn from so-called primitive cultures. If we'll open up to their problems and cultural content, we will all be the richer for it.
Even the documentary form of the first part of the film also makes proper sense in light of this interpretation. The documentary part is supposed to make the audience identify with the whites, whereas when the documentary style of storytelling disappears, the audience is left free to choose a different allegiance. In other words, we start by being shown that *we* are the ones at fault, and then we are given the opportunity to change.
This is a brilliant film. I rate it 10 stars out of 10.