District 9: No Humans Allowed

The movie was set in South Africa, and the story takes place in the slums of Johannesburg known as District 9, a refugee camp set up to separate the humans from the aliens who have lived there for 20years. The emotional movie which was shot documentary-style to reflect reality shows how human beings built a relationship with the extraterrestrial race that is forced to live in slum-like condition on earth. Then suddenly (the aliens) finds a friend in government who is exposed to their technology by accident.

Alien space crafts are seen hovering over many locations of the city, interrupting daily human lives and raising concerns from the residents of the area. The movie which is sort of a human commentary and also a reverse of the usual (alien movies) where humans are afraid of aliens, this time around, the aliens are the ones who are scared of what the humans might do to them. Though there is evidence that those extraterrestrials – brutally referred to as prawns because of their loosely crustacean appearance – represent an advanced civilization, their lives on Earth are marked by filth and dysfunction.

And they are viewed by South Africans of all races with suspicion, occasional pity and racist hostility.  The South African setting improves the story of District 9 to a quick relevant point. That country’s history of apartheid and its continuing social problems are never mentioned, but they hardly need to be. And the film’s implications extend far beyond the boundaries of a particular nation, which is taken as more or less representative of the planet as a whole.

At its central part the film tells the story hardly a strange one in the literature of modern South Africa of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes aware of the injustice that keeps him in his place and the others, his chosen inferiors, in theirs. The cost he pays for this knowledge is brutal, as it must be, given the dreadful outline of the system. But if the film’s view of the world is unwelcoming, it is not quite a rejection. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated. This brilliant piece of work was directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by the visionary Peter Jackson.