District 9 best film of the year depicting the dark side of humans

My husband and I saw District 9 over the weekend. We both walked out at the end of the movie with very different opinions. My husband thought the movie was very dark and evil, and showed the worst about people. I on the other hand loved the movie and that is showed reality on what goes in world on different fronts. I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie would be up for a few Oscars.

The movie shows how fishy looking aliens are fenced in an area in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are treated as second class citizens. How the humans or people of the city of Johannesburg do not want them integrated in the society as they look different, talk different and love different food e.g. Cat food. Cat food to the fishy aliens is like drugs. They go nuts over cat food.

It further shows how racisms takes fold by using derogatory terms like “Prawns” to describe the Aliens. The conditions the fenced in Aliens live in are miserable, small shanty town made of cardboard and garbage all around. Gang warfare, Black market for selling cat food to the aliens in return for high technology Aliens weapons. Ignorant war loads trying to gain alien powers by killing and eating alien limbs to operate the alien weapons. The interesting twist was the Alien weapons were so superior that only Aliens could operate and not humans. The Aliens possessed superior technology than the humans but seemed to be lost on earth in a different environment where they were treated as inferior. This reminded me a lot about the Aborigines in Australia, Apartheid in South Africa, or the colonized Indian subcontinent or even the walled Palestinians. They may have been great at one time but after their circumstances changed they became inferior, or treated as sub humans and lived in poor conditions.

The movie further explores “wall street “like capitalism where people will do anything for a buck. The main character of the District 9, Wikus (played by Sharlto Copley), is bureaucrat working at MNU the agency that deals with Alien issues. He is put in charge of relocating 1.8Million Aliens from a location in Johannesburg to smaller shelters outside the city, by his father in law. So there is some nepotism that is going on as all eyes on Wikus and entire world is watching Wikus giving the aliens an eviction notice to move. The poor Aliens do not seem to understand what an eviction notice is and the laws that apply in Johannesburg, since they have not integrated into the rest of Johannesburg society and the city wants them out. Wikus somehow gets sprayed with alien fuel that took two smart aliens 20 years to make and starts turning Wikus into a Prawn (the alien). As soon as the father in law and MNU finds out about Wikus mutating into an alien they want to harvest Wikus’s organs, Kill Wikus, and sell to the highest bidder to be able to replicate the mutation process to take control over alien weaponry (,as the alien weapons can only be operated by aliens not human). It showed the dark side of the father in law who wanted to sell his son in laws soul for experimentation/ control over the alien technology. Wikus also learns that MNU has been conducting experiments and killing aliens illegally to gain control over the aliens. The movie sheds light on bad capitalism as well, taking advantage of the weak.

In short I loved the movie and I think for the first time I saw an alien Sci-Fi movie where aliens where not trying to take over the earth by killing the human race. Instead sheds light on the problems in our society of greed and fear of the unknown and difference.