In today’s assignment I am talking about the movie District 9, a 2009 science fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamby. In his feature film, he introduced a whole new world in which a few questions arise. “What is this concept of violence towards a constantly new outgroup of people (or beings)“ and “How the Apartheid continues to mirror itself on today’s society“?
The movie District 9 presents a topic about treatment of non-native people or in this context – beings, as well as themes like racism and xenophobia which are shown in the form of speciesism. Unlike many other sci-fi movies, in District 9, the aliens coming to Earth are not coming to invade us or be violent with us, but to search for help. In the film itself the scene is set in 1982, when a giant alien spaceship arrives to Earth over the South African city of Johannesburg. Inside the ship there were over a million sick and weak aliens. In the movie they are called “Prawns” which is an insect similar to a cricket. The South African government decides to put the aliens into a camp where they can stay until they find a way to get out of Earth. The camp is called District 9 and throughout the years it has been turned into a filthy, undeveloped slum. Humans living by constantly complain about the aliens and how they are filthy and always try to steal resources from humans.
The movie is clearly intended to comment and question on xenophobia and racism, but it gets its effects through forcing the viewer, to view the happenings in the movie through the eyes of the racist. District 9 tries to uplift life and energy, but the landscape itself is the landscape of death: decayed, strewn with garbage, and crumbing.
While setting the story in South African Johannesburg alludes not only to the crimes committed by the Apartheid Regime, but it shows that history is just repeating itself. To prove it, the movie just replaced the Apartheid system between humans with the one between humans and aliens. A question arises – Can constant discrimination of a particular group be considered a part of human nature judging from the number of times it has happened throughout history?
Andries du Toit from the fantastic asubtleknife blog said: “Apartheid repression was never just about violence. Instead, it was a strange and carefully composed mix of brutal force, racist anthropology, Foucauldian surveillance, and a curious, bureaucratic obsession with the appearance of due process and the rule of law.” The same can be said in the context of this movie, as we can see all the things mentioned above being forced onto the extraterrestrials.
To conclude, I think the movie proved to give a great but subtle presentation of what the Apartheid done to the South African people. I really liked it the first time I saw it, probably 5 years ago, when I considered it to be a fantastic sci-fi movie. On the second watching, I realized the true potential it holds in explaining certain political and sociological concepts. It truly is a modern science fiction masterpiece.
Quotes taken from: https://asubtleknife.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/science-fiction-in-the-ghetto-loving-the-alien/ – article by Andries du Toit
