District 9 Review: We Have Met the Alien and He is Us
I saw District 9 a week ago, but it took me a while to organize my thoughts about it. As we left the movie theater, a family member asked, “Did you like it?” But like isn’t a word you can apply to a movie such as this. It’s impressive, almost overwhelmingly so, and judging from the reviews and the blogs on this subject, everybody has an opinion about it. The movie-makers did several things right, and a number of important things wrong.
The single most important achievement of the movie is that it upends the usual cliches. This isn’t about innocent aliens (ET) or evil ones (Invasion of the Body-Snatchers). These aliens are neutral, stranded here on our planet with neither good nor bad intentions toward humans. In fact, the movie isn’t about the aliens; it’s about human responses to them. And not heroic responses, either (most of Star Trek). For this reason, the mock documentary approach works well because it makes us see a human xenophobic response to a crisis that isn’t being handled too well. The device of giving us supposedly “real” people reporting on the events serves a second purpose in bypassing the viewer’s defensive disbelief. This is a very old ploy, of course; Mary Shelley opens her fantastical tale of Frankenstein and his monster by an elaborate set-up in which we’re introduced to a thoroughly admirable character, a sea captain engaged on a voyage of discovery in the Arctic. When Frankenstein tells him the story, and he believes, how can we readers not?
It’s not by chance that the story is set in South Africa, a country that in recent memory had a vicious system of apartheid, in which non-whites were denied equality and segregated into their own poverty-stricken areas where disease and crime raged (Soweto being the one the film calls to mind). We are more willing to believe this kind of behavior from South Africa than, say, Switzerland (though that would be an interesting movie). Also, the film subtly hints that all is still not well in this version of South Africa; although the final credits are impressively loaded with names of obvious African origin, none of the principal actors are black. It would have made for a different story if some of those ordering the massacre of the aliens were black – or female.
Apartheid, of course, is what the film is about. Humans have a distressing tendency to sort people into “Us” and “Them.” There is no evidence to suggest that we would abandon this ancient defensive mechanism in the face of alien encounters. And so we may be appalled that the stranded aliens are herded into District 9’s slums, but we aren’t surprised. Even the rise of denigrating terms to describe the aliens (“Prawns”) is realistic. The fate of the character, Wikus, who becomes contaminated with alien DNA is also believable in its context. We don’t have a good record of behaving well to those whose fate, perhaps through no fault of their own, becomes entangled with the enemy. Kill them all and let God sort out his own is a philosophy with deep roots in human history.
So far then, we have a familiar cautionary tale that grows out of the sacred literature of many cultures: Nothing good comes of abusing the stranger at our gates. There are some humorous “in-jokes” – most notably, the bad guys are a pack of criminal Nigerians wielding heavy-duty weapons instead of email scams. (It should go without saying that the majority of Nigeria’s citizens are law-abiding, and they probably feel as insulted by this appearance of their countrymen as villains as good Italians feel watching The Godfather.)
But the film doesn’t hold up as science fiction because of several gaping plot holes. The first of these is the lack of believable explanation for the presence of the alien ship over Johannesburg in the first place. Apparently, the ship’s inhabitants weren’t particularly aiming for Earth when they fell ill. Why orbit here – in a stunning visual that evokes Arthur C. Clarke’s alien visitation in Childhood’s End? Clarke’s aliens came with a purpose. If there was a reason given for District 9‘s aliens’ visit, then I missed it. Another rather unbelievable nod to the SF canon comes when Wikus – who we’ve been asked to believe is slowly evolving into an alien himself – suddenly turns into a cross between the Terminator and something out of Transformers to kill those who are hunting him. In the film’s defense, we could say that many science fiction stories use such fanciful ploys to bring about an ending satisfactory to the hero. But because the transformation isn’t even hinted at earlier, here it seems cartoonish. (In the theater, the audience laughed at this point.)
I can well imagine that humans would find a way to blast their way aboard the ship, but we aren’t told the hole has been repaired by (and why would it be?) the time the father and son alien survivors take off at the end. The father and son are sympathetic characters, played against the usual alien stereotypes, but therein lies another problem. The aliens look weird enough, but their motivation and behavior are all-too human. Wikus even manages to understand their language, though we’re never told how this came about. And so can we, because it’s painfully obvious what all that grunting means; we would have said the same thing under the circumstances. Movies frequently fall into the either/or trap with alien characters. Either they’re inscrutable and we’ll never understand what they want, or they’re so much like us that we understand them too well. The first leads to lazy plotting where anything can happen, however bizarre, and the film doesn’t so much as hazard a guess as to why; the second results in a movie that’s a thinly-disguised allegory about ourselves. Such is the case for District 9. For make no mistake, this movie isn’t about the aliens; it’s about us.
There are other holes in the plot – eating alien flesh as a way of absorbing and utilizing alien DNA is one – but I’m ready to forgive a movie a few flaws if the overall experience is moving or thrilling in some way. District 9 is visually interesting and exciting. Many of the problems that I’ve pointed out slipped past harmlessly while I was viewing it and only occurred to me in retrospect. And apart from the problems I’ve explored here, the story is unfortunately all too believable as a scenario for some future encounter with aliens. We may be seeing ourselves in a dark mirror here. So I can’t say, in answer to my relative’s question, that I liked it. But I did find it thought-provoking.
*With apologies to Walt Kelly’s Pogo.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
