District 9 is not for the faint of heart. Its gruesome violence is instead for the full of heart: those who value how science fiction can comment on horrific political realities. Political reality is signaled by the setting of this film—Johannesburg, South Africa—a location famous for Apartheid, a system by which blacks were segregated from whites through the development of all-black “townships”: what we might call segregated “districts.” The “District 9” that names this film is a township developed for space alien refugees: creatures nicknamed “prawns” because they look like huge sea shrimp with arms and legs. But in the word “prawns” we also hear “pawns”; the creatures are pawns to a system that fears that which is “alien”: that which looks, talks, and acts differently than majority culture. And we see that the segregation of aliens into wretched living environments turns them wretchedly violent, making them all the more feared by South Africans, who use despicable violence to subdue them.

By: Crystal Downing

All good science fiction is a commentary on its own time. District 9 is good science fiction, and one needs to look no further than the film’s setting to understand this: Johannesburg, South Africa. Apartheid in the 21st century. Whites and…aliens. Director Neill Blomkamp uses documentary style footage and a real world grittiness to tell a story of racial hatred, prejudice, and xenophobia. This time around, the blacks are aliens, and the aliens represent suppressed humans across the globe.

District 9 is a slum on the outskirts of a near future Johannesburg where marooned aliens are forced to live after their mother ship mysteriously arrives above the South African city. The aliens resemble insects, or perhaps marine invertebrates, and come to be nicknamed “prawns” a derogatory descriptive, as one police officer remarks, “I mean, you can’t say they don’t look like that, that’s what they look like, right? They look like prawns” meaning the species of shrimp-like crustacean. This sets up the extreme oppression the aliens are forced into by their human overlords. The aliens are routinely mistreated, abused, and never allowed to travel beyond the heavily militarized borders of District 9. Very rapidly this slum becomes a hotbed of illegal drugs, guns, black market trafficking, and violent crime. The aliens live in poverty, never becoming more than insects to their human neighbors.

The film’s action begins as the human outcry against the ghastly District 9 reaches fever pitch, and the Multinational United private military corporation steps in to relocate the over 1.8 million aliens to a site 240 kilometers away from Johannesburg, District 10. During the course of serving “eviction notices”, a horrible perversion of justice, the lead operative Wikus van de Merwe becomes involved in the alien’s plight in a way he never imagined possible.

District 9 draws heavily on its inspiration, a six-minute short film called “Alive in Joburg”, also directed by Neill Blomkamp, and featuring a similar plot. Both films reference the historical forced removal of over 60,000 black South Africans from a District Six in Cape Town which occurred between 1968 and 1982 while apartheid was under effect in South Africa. Then it was blacks. Today it is aliens. District 9 leaves us with questions: how different are we? What kind of creatures will that difference turn us into? Will we become monsters, or will we remember that we are all human?

By: Philip Joel Martin