Alien Nation

Rating: 6/10 (3 December 2013)

The film is an allegory of Apartheid in South Africa. District 9 is inspired by events in District 6, Cape Town during the apartheid era.
District 9 has a mockumentary setting with interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras.
In a dystopian Johannesburg in South Africa; humans and aliens called 'prawns' live amongst each other.
The 'prawns' live in government camps but a private security company is hired to move them to an internment camp.
Neither humans or prawns are happy living with the other on the same ground and the prawns live in poor conditions and suffer intense discrimination and treated like third class people.
Sharlto Copley plays the well meaning but dim bureaucrat and son in law of the boss of the private security firm.
He has been the patsy appointed to handle the relocation to the internment camp but is sprayed by some fluid in a canister that the prawns were hiding which alters his DNA. Now the person who was the oppressor experiences life as the oppressed.
The mockumentary format works very well in this film and it's Copley's performance that carries this film.
Copley was unknown before this film, he really grabs the role and also fills it with a lot of humour. If it was not for him, it may had failed or just remain an obscure movie.
The setting in South Africa is refreshing and the special effects are very good. Not everything in the story grabbed me, some of the characters were rather two dimensional.
The parallel to the events of South Africa are obvious to older people outside of South Africa as it was a daily news story up to the early 1990s.
However it is not entirely original as the film Alien Nation in 1988 had a similar theme regarding discrimination against aliens.