So this past weekend brought us “District 9â€. The highly acclaimed full feature movie based on the short documentary –style film by Neil Blomkamp, called Alive in Joburg. The movie is about an alien ship that gets stranded in our Earth’s atmosphere over a city in Africa 28 years prior to the events in the movie. The Aliens have been taken from the ship and have been put into a makeshift refugee camp. In the time since they arrived, Earth’s nations not knowing what to do with the Aliens start a new union called the MNU (Multi –National United) with functions as the base headquarters of alien affairs. The residents of Africa grow tired of the situation and the fact that the refugee camp is now just an alien infested ghetto, and they want the government to find them somewhere else to live. This is where the story starts.
MNU decides that they are going to move the camp further away from the civilians and promotes Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) to run the operations. He is put in charge of going into the camp and giving the aliens who have now made this area their home, eviction notices. The lifestyles of these aliens are that of any refugee separated from their natural homelands. They are trying to survive in a world that is uncommon to them. In his efforts to evict the residents, each home is searched for weapons and illegal activities. While on his search of one particular dwelling he runs across an alien marked canister that isn’t a weapon, but also is something he has not come across before. He accidently gets sprayed by the contents of the canister and becomes ill. In the hours that past he starts to develop strange changes in his DNA. When MNU learns of this, they take him into custody and want to run experiments on him to see if he can unlock the secrets of the alien’s weaponry and technology. Wikus escapes and becomes the world’s most wanted man. He discovers that the only place left for him to hide is in District 9.
I thought this movie was brilliant. The story was well put together and had a lot of undertones of real situations that have gone on in world history. When you watch this movie you know exactly what’s going on and what it is saying. It’s no coincidence that the title District 9 is most likely a reference to “District Sixâ€, an infamous inner –city neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa. During the apartheid regime, over 60,000 of District Six’s non-white residents were forced to pack up and relocate. You see the government only wanted to get what was best for them and didn’t really care about the aliens. I don’t want to throw too much of the movie in your face, but I do think it’s a great movie and should be seen. The beginning of the film is set up like a documentary telling the story of what happened in District 9, and a little bit about Wikus. Then the film shifts to the actual events that occurred, and then it shifts back to the end of the documentary. Now I know a lot of people see aliens in a movie trailer and immediately think it’s going to be another invasion movie. It’s not! It’s a well thought out premise of real life situations in the world, and the aliens represent a broader meaning. You have to see this movie with an open mind. Yes there are some funny scenes in the movie to keep it from getting too deep, but this movie was made to show people how the world can really be to the less fortunate. I give this movie 3 ½ aliens out of 4. It really made you feel for these aliens who didn’t come here to take over our planet, but just got stranded on the wrong planet. This movie runs 1 hour and 53mins. It was rated R for bloody violence and pervasive language. It was written and directed by Neil Blomkamp. It was produced by Peter Jackson and WingNut Films. It was distributed by TriStar Pictures.
Reviewed by Eric Williams
Refugees are just people who are misfortunate in life and need to be treated as equals, like anyone else. Ezo
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