The Darkest District

Rating: 10/10 (16 October 2009)

In Metamorphosis, Kafka explores social reaction to a man being transformed into a giant insect. In Blood Diamond, bounty hunter Leonardo DiCaprio shows the best and worst of humanity as he races through strife-torn Africa to liberate a family. District 9 has a Blair Witch Project style reality TV format buildup – aliens land up in Johannesburg with little to offer and nowhere else to go. They are stigmatized ("prawns" as epithet), victimized ("humans only"), and isolated and forced to live in a giant slum on the city outskirts. Their only hope of returning to their planet finds an unlikely hero in the form of Wikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who, largely motivated by his own desire to return to normal, brings hope of deliverance in a disturbing milieu. District 9 manages to showcase the best and worst of man – persecution and sheer human cruelty, the arms race, and the profiteering from vice, in sharp contrast to the coming of age of Van De Merwe and his last gasp effort that gives the "prawns" their only last vestige of hope for escaping from the cruelty of man. An outstanding movie and one that, irrespective of the analogies I began with, I find it hard to think of a parallel