Best scifi satire since Starship Troopers

Rating: 8/10 (4 December 2010)

There have been a few great scifi satires in the history of cinema: Robocop, Starship Troopers, Alphaville, Zardoz, Frankenhooker. The scifi genre is perfect for satire because it inherently brings a degree of fantasy and surrealism, setting the stage for anything-goes.
You can choose to view District 9 as a straightforward action story. But I think its beauty lies in its social commentary which is done through hilarious satire, just like the aforementioned films. For starters, the "hero" of the story is a sweater-vest-wearing nerd, not a musclebound, stone-jawed stud. This should be a tipoff that the presentation isn't meant to be taken literally; it's tongue-in-cheek. Next, we see that the movie takes on a "mockumentary" feel, a lot like the great comedies Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman. Again this catches us off guard and encourages us to laugh at things that would otherwise be shocking.
That's a good thing because the story, if seen beneath its thinly veiled metaphor for racial segregation and government sponsored apartheid in South Africa, would be pretty damn depressing. Enter the satire: the storytelling device through which we can tolerate such disturbing and shocking themes and still be entertained. Archie Bunker taught us this.
Like I said, you can ignore everything I'm saying and instead enjoy this as an action flick; it has plenty of hair-raising, seat-gripping tension for that (and who couldn't love guns that make people explode like bloated sacks of ketchup?). But what sets this film above the average is its ability to combine its futuristic action & story with a very contemporary social problem. And it does this while giving us a fun ride.
I have 2 minor gripes. One is that the nonstop barrage of sarcasm & dark satire can be very taxing after a while, like watching a 2-hour marathon of "Everybody Loves Raymond", you eventually want to punch someone. My other gripe is that the shaky camera, while adding an interesting sense of realism, can eventually induce dizziness, vertigo and vomiting, especially when you're watching scenes of a guy acting dizzy, vertiginous and vomitous. Also, the scenes of meat lockers and hunks of putrid, unidentifiable flesh on the chopping block are enough to turn anyone vegetarian for an evening. Overall it can be an exhausting experience, definitely not your shiny, happy Spielberg fare (E.T. would crap his pants in this world), but I guess it was the director's intent to convey the disturbing conditions he himself was intimately acquainted with, having grown up in Johannesburg in the 80s. I do recommend that you familiarize yourself with South Africa's history if you really want to get the most out of this movie. Then you will see, as with Starship Troopers, that this is not a fantasy about spaceships and bug-eyed aliens, but rather, it's a very contemporary allegory about our own human fears & prejudices.