District 9

While I was suffering this weekend I watched a cam copy of District 9 and I couldn't help but wonder how Hollywood would have messed up this terrific story had they been the ones in charge of making it. Instead of something loud and disposable we get a thoroughly fascinating and absorbing allegory of alien racism and the human predilection to treat everything we don't understand with fear and destruction. Twenty years after an alien spaceship appears over the skies of Johannesburg (not Paris or Washington) a private security firm (the MNU) is set to move over a million of the 'Prawns' out of the refugee camp of District 9 to a new holding area. The government wishes to further minimize human/alien contact and with only the flimsiest of legalities do they move in with the military. The action is shot with hand held camera's giving it a documentary feel. This technique is very effective and forces the viewer to search backgrounds for clues to what is really going on in this gulag. Leading the operation is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) a typically clueless bureaucrat who treats his job with the cold impersonal nature that is often seen from someone who works in social services. After awhile the aliens are seen a things and not individuals. Only what makes them different is noticed much in the same way as Apartheid worked in South Africa. The parallels between the movie events and real life can't be ignored. Even the term for the aliens - 'prawns' - is more of a racial slur based solely on the way the aliens appear. As is common in such allegories, van de Merwe is about to discover what happens when the hunter becomes the hunted when he is treated with the same cold efficiency as the aliens themselves are treated by their human jailers. Once he becomes someone the authorities can exploit he no longer is afforded rights or loyalty. After his exposure to an alien virus he begins to grow a claw much like the appendages of the aliens. The 'accident' that causes his transformation makes him valuable since he now is able to operate the DNA based weaponry that has up to to this point proven unusable by humans. Seeing things through the eyes of a particular alien (given the human name Christopher Johnson) changes van der Merwe's motivations. I guess you really have to walk a mile (or ten billion miles) in someone else's shoes to understand them. Some may fault the movie for turning into a science fiction thriller in the final third but I enjoyed the blend of action with the social commentary. The end left me not wanting a sequel although all the parts are clearly there to revisited this story again. I am so glad that Hollywood did not make this movie...no toys...no fast food tie ins...nothing but a great science fiction tale that left me feeling sad for the human race. If aliens did come to earth I have little hope that events would not progress as were shown in this movie. Its just the way we roll as a species and that is not a good thing.