Spoilers. Just saying.
On Friday, Alexandra discussed the apartheid and Holocaust influences of District 9, a psychotic combination of BBC's The Office and Aliens, is perhaps the best science fiction film besides Children of Men to have been made in some time. There's something about the smaller scale of the storylines of these films that makes them more affecting--the cliche of a national monument being destroyed simply isn't affecting anymore. There are also similarities between both films--which feature a single hero hopelessly battling the forces of a world driven insane by tribalism and circumstance. By using past human atrocities as a framework, it hopes to create a world that could be our own--as much as any science fiction film can, anyway.
But where Children of Men ends on a somewhat hopeful note, the world of District 9 is hopeless. Wikus van der Merwe's conversion is forced by his circumstances--but no amount of "Prawn" suffering will convince the outside world that they are worthy of the respect accorded to human beings. The "Prawns" are displaced from a slum to a concentration camp, and there is no hope for integration, and only a flicker of one for escape. Moreover, one can't help but assume that the return of their countrymen would result in some sort of bloodshed--particularly once they see what the humans have done. It's not as though the tribal lines are drawn exclusively between human and alien either, the soldiers of MNU and the Nigerian gangs slaughter one another as readily as they do the aliens.
Violent tribalist hatred then, is the most enduring feature of the world of District 9. Van der Merwe will never be able to return to his wife, Chris Johnson will probably never return from his home planet, and the "Prawns" will never be free. The only hope lies outside the film, with the audience watching it. The idea is that in learning to identify with the aliens, the audience may have, for a moment, transcended the petty tribalism that mars this dystopian Johannesberg. In doing so, the film hopes to nudge us toward a better future the world of District 9 could never have. Our world, fortunately, isn't that hopeless. Yet in some ways, as with the portrayal of the Nigerian gangs, the film seems to, as Spencer writes succumb to the very evil it attempts to fight.
The film has some narrative flaws--van der Merwe's conversion is somewhat implausible, for example. But it does what science fiction should do, which is sit down and ask, in a kind of sugar-rush addled paranoia, where the hell is this all going, and actually make us care about the answer.
-- A. Serwer
