District 9: Sci-Fi Substance AND Flash

This post contains spoilers for the movie District 9.

Typically, science fiction movies -- even the good ones -- are summer popcorn fare. They're big, fun, splashy spectacles, and discussion about the film typically takes the form, "it was so cool when..." The deeper aspects of the genre -- the subversiveness and the social commentary -- are usually left to the print and small-screen incarnations. Occasionally, we'll get a science fiction film like Gattaca that goes for substance over flash. This year, we were lucky to get District 9, a science fiction movie that delivered both.

In the District 9 world, when the flying saucer came, it did not head for New York or Washington D.C. -- it hovered over Johannesburg, South Africa, where it stayed for twenty years while its dying crew were shuttled into a makeshift settlement camp below. The human protagonist, Wikus Van De Merwe, is an administrator in the bureaucracy charged with managing the alien refugees, which mainly means keeping the "prawns" (an epithet that both describes the aliens' anatomy and their perception as "bottom feeders") contained and out of the way of the humans, who are none too happy to have these visitors on Earth.

The first third of the movie is filmed in the style of a newscast or documentary, and the obvious parallel to apartheid comes to gritty life through the visuals. The alien ghetto is a slum, where the prawns (a race with technology superior to our own) live like animals and scavenge through garbage. It has all the problems of a slum as well, including gangs both human and alien, drugs (cat food, for the aliens) and random violence. Wikus is charged with leading a team of administrators -- backed by military men -- to force the aliens to sign consent papers (to pacify the "human" rights groups) before relocating them to another camp, away from Johannesburg. Most of the aliens don't understand what they're signing; when Wikus encounters one who does -- and refuses -- he threatens to have Child Services take the alien's offspring. As the camera follows him, Wikus cheerfully demonstrates how they deal with everything from illegal contraband to unauthorized breeding. The special effects are very good in that they are seamless: the aliens and technology blend into the general squalor of the landscape.

District 9 keeps the focus on the real, visceral details of its immediate setting, but gives us glimpses, through faux newscasts and interviews, of how the larger world has been altered by the aliens' arrival. There are "alien rights" watchdog groups just as there are groups trying to exploit the aliens. There are well-meaning bureaucrats who perpetrate atrocities through sheer negligence or overextension. But the slums could be slums anywhere, populated by any marginalized and downtrodden people.

The characters and plot are solid, but there is nothing new about the bureaucrat whose eyes are opened, or the course he takes once they are. And while the ending undoubtedly provided the groundwork for a "District 10", it was a satisfying ending on its own, showing that the problems depicted in the fim are never easily or cleanly resolved, and there ought to be a sense of foreboding about what has been wrought when an oppressed people find that their circumstances are poised to change.

District 9 is not a feel-good action movie that will leave you dazzled; but it is compelling science fiction that will make you think about how we treat each other.