District 9 (2009)

Starring: Sharlto Copely, Jason Cope. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Produced by Key Creatives. 112 minutes. MPAA “R’ rating. Parent’s Advisory for profanity, violence and gore, and frightening/intense scenes.

The extraterrestrials in the sci-fi film District 9 are taken captive by the South African army without a fight and incarcerated in squalid refuge camps in Johannesburg. The locals call the extraterrestrials Prawns but, cinematically, they are more like gefilte fish. All Prawns are slender and tall with wide shoulders and fetching wasp waists like the robots in I Robot. They have veil-like tentacles over their mouth, same as the bad boy in Predator, and they speak a clickier, less guttural dialect of Klingon. Their skin is horny and plaited like the Ninja Turtles and they have hooves like the aliens in Contact.

The one really unique thing about Prawns is that they roll over so quickly. Their name caries more than whiff of terms like Kaffir and Sami, toxic slang full of the triumphalist racial fear and loathing that fueled apartheid, the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, holocausts of every size and shape. These visitors from another world are treated with the thwackingly punitive disdain that non-humans deserve in a zero sum game for dominance of planet Earth.

Humans neutralize the Prawns in District 9 because they are understandably afraid of a civilization that has mastered interplanetary travel. We know in our bones that human history is the story of stronger nations conquering weaker ones, and that conquest is usually driven by an advanced technology of some kind, iron over bronze, wheel over foot, guns over swords. Prawns are a trophy species, something in a cage to amuse and distract people from their troubles, another feather in the cap that humans believe is the crown of creation.

But Prawns still must earn their keep like everyone else on planet Earth, and their novel alien biology makes them cash cows, rare commodities which can be easily converted to a handsome profit. The aliens’ claw-like hands are hacked off, for example, and sold as a kind of power bar. There’s also a thriving trade among sexual adventurers drawn to the flame of alien bordellos. But this stuff is chump change compared to figuring out how to operate the cache of rifle-like Prawn weapons that have been captured, gizmos with the kick of the Ghostbusters’ nuclear-powered backpacks but painted like boogie boards.

Director Blomkamp’s film is high-spirited but gory like RoboCop but nicely balanced by dollops of crisp, CNN-style news reportage, also like RoboCop. The film really works as an R-rated, entertaining sci-fi/action/comedy/thriller/moral fable.

A field agent named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our hero, a bureaucrat quirky enough to be likable. He is the lead government employee tasked with moving 1.8 million Prawns to a new camp, District 10. The real motive in this operation is to disrupt any guerilla activities in the planning stages, and Wikus finds plenty of ingenious weapons systems made from spare parts including an elaborate computer network. The plot hinges on his accidentally ingesting the fruit of a jerry rigged chemistry lab, a very nasty black liquid, and then physically beginning to morph into a Prawn.

Life is never easy for cross-genome dressers. The humans in Wikus’ life, including his wife, toss him overboard pretty fast and the Prawns don’t trust him either. But Wikus can at least live as an outlaw among the Prawns and buy cat food (a Prawn delicacy) from the Nigerian warlords who are the aliens’ commercial brokers with the outside world. Pretty quickly, Wikus discovers that Prawns care about their friends and children and hate being bullied by police but go along with it to avoid further trouble.
In other words, accoutrement aside, the Prawns have a certain sensitivity that we recognize as being human and the humans who control the Prawns’ act with an insensitivity that can only be called alien.

Suffice it to say, like Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Wikus becomes more sympathetic to the Prawns as he experiences the cruelty inflicted on him as a non-human with alien parts. So does the viewer. The mind reels, the heart convulses, somehow history slogs on. When will we ever learn?

Back in the day, there were three reasons why extraterrestrials would pop by the Earth: to destroy humans (War of the Worlds, et.al), enslave us (The Matrix) or to help us grow up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, et.al). The aliens in District 9 aren’t monsters, missionaries or messiahs. The Prawns are strangers in a strange land but it’s the humans that are truly strange, and really scary. Scarier still, we are the only ones with the power to save us from ourselves.