SF as brilliant allegory

Rating: 9/10 (24 May 2010)

The basic plot of this film is well known. An alien space ship stops over Johannesburg, South Africa in the 80s. Its crew are found to be near starving and unable to properly control the ship. The aliens are resettled in segregated camps in Johannesburg, and twenty years later, as their situation has deteriorated to leave them helpless, feared and hated by South Africans, black and white, in a delicious, ironic poke at South Africa's Apartheid history, they are about to be resettled in camps further away from humans.
The plot involves a civil servant type of man of the company contracted to oversee the aliens carrying out an eviction, how he becomes infected with an alien substance (that the aliens ironically need to fly their ships) and gradually starts changing into one of them. His trials and tribulations and, one could say, his final discovery of his own humanity as he aids the aliens' flight from their brutal human pursuers, amongst truly violent and gory action scenes is what makes the movie.
I am a South African, who, like Neill Blomkamp emigrated from South Africa during the last violent days of Apartheid, but, in what is perhaps also similar to Blomkamp's views, has come to realise that Apartheid, racism, fear and hatred of things you don't understand is not a South African phenomenon.
I see many people, especially many Americans, expressing a great deal of anger towards this film in the reviews, and that makes me think above all that this film is a success. Not because it angers so many Americans, but why it does so.
Some of the negative reactions are based on what is pretty obviously the factor that many Americans have extremely stereotypical views of what the rest of the world is like, and a movie like this shakes that belief. They feel upset that America isn't the centre of attention for a change. This is a good thing in my opinion.
Another negative reaction, this one not restricted to the above mentioned people, is the feeling that the special effects should somehow be shinier, more pronounced and that the technology should be more in the foreground. To them, I can only say that this wasn't a film for action-tech nerds, and that they should look elsewhere, chiefly at Hollywood, which releases dozens of films that rely on special effects for want of a real story.
A similar grouping of people dislike the film due to its violence, gore and copious use of abusive language. To those I suggest they turn on the TV and watch any, really any, real world violent situation. When people are being shot at and dying, or in utter desperation to some catastrophic situation in their lives, polite language is usually not the first thing that comes to their minds.
The final group of negative reactions, and perhaps the saddest ones of all, are the people who see "aliens" and immediately wonder how a star-travelling race could sink to such a level of depravity and revulsion, why they couldn't simply switch on the death ray, get back in the pilot seat, evaporate the humans and fly away.
To those people I point to so many instances of human behaviour in our current technical world where we still fail to live according to principle. Would passengers on a crashed jet liner know how to fly the plane? Have not previously civilised groups of people acted with utter barbarity to other people before? Hint: Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Rwanda etc.
Why would aliens be any different? And why should they be any different when part of the purpose of the film is allegory to point out exactly that fact, that barbarity and cruelty is not a preserve of "them", the others, and that today's oppressed can become tomorrows oppressors? I think this film is a fantastic success, and its amazing to see fresh, local faces giving more spontaneous performances than spoilt Hollywood bratlets.