District 9 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: District 9 Matthew Jones District 9 (2009). Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Distributed by TriStar Pictures. www.sonypictures.com 112 minutes. When, in 1982, a metropolis-sized alien spaceship took up residence in the Earth's skies it did not hover above London or New York as one might expect, but instead hung over Johannesburg, a city still in the grip of apartheid. With their craft immobile and a strange disease holding sway amongst the population, the anthropoid aliens were taken pity on, welcomed to Earth and invited to live alongside the human population. It was not long, however, before tensions with the locals ignited and South Africa's new guests were forcibly relocated into a shantytown slum populated by murderous gangs, [End Page 120] cat food peddlers (the equivalent of drug pushers for the aliens) and prostitutes. The situation destabilised and by 2010 the creatures, now 1.8 million in number, were again facing involuntary and violent relocation to a new camp outside the city. When Wikus van de Merwe and a heavy military force are sent in to serve eviction notices, the trouble really begins. So begins District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by The Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson. At its heart, this is a science fiction blockbuster that has, alongside Watchmen, sought to recover some respectability for the genre amid 2009's crop of popcorn spectacles (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator: Salvation and Gamer come to mind). Replete with obvious allusions to South Africa's brutally segregated past, this is a film in which something much more interesting is at work beneath the sci-fi gloss than in its multiplex cousins. Indeed, the media has done much to promote this as a film that in some way engages with the history of apartheid, using the 'Otherness' of its aliens to discuss South Africa's racial Others of recent decades. There is much within the film itself to support claims that it exploits the possibilities for social commentary that are inherent in the science fiction genre. Coming to the screen entrenched in a strong sense of man's inhumanity to man, District 9 is not satisfied with its allusions to apartheid but instead looks much deeper into the history of the 20th century and connects the dots between all the human cruelty it finds. When van de Merwe warns one of the aliens not to go to District 10, the new camp built specifically for the visitors, the sense of urgency and horror in his voice leads one to imagine that inspiration for the solution to the alien problem might have been drawn from the Nazi's Final Solution or the Soviet Gulags. These camps were themselves based on precedents set by the Spanish during the Ten Years' War, the Americans during the Philippine-American War and the British during the Boer War in South Africa itself. District 9's District 10 draws on a long and dreadful human heritage of interment and casts its horrors into an all too imaginable future. Thus the film suggests that as long as we perceive physical difference, be it in terms of race or species, to be a signifier of psychical dissimilarity then such brutalisation will recur. It is not, however, only historical horrors that are allowed to emerge into the film text. The underground, militarised experimentation site operated by the shadowy Multinational United, in which Wikus is subjected to inhuman cruelty so that information can be gathered about him, displays more than a passing similarity of function and purpose to Guantanamo Bay and the so-called CIA 'black sites' across the globe. The fact that a non-governmental organisation manages this operation recalls the farming out of security responsibilities to Blackwater Worldwide (now Xe) and the profiteering of Haliburton during the ongoing war in Iraq. Though District 9 makes explicit efforts to draw connections between its dystopian future and specific historical atrocities, it also seeks to comment on the current disregard for human beings displayed in contemporary conflicts. In so doing it suggests that we are part of our own histories, repeating the brutality of our past and, if we continue unabated, projecting...