It has been a while since I've written a movie review. It's been a while since I've seen a movie that moved me to ponder a long time after. Mind you, I watched a copy that did not have the subtitled translations for the aliens' speech. Surprisingly I still enjoyed the film. When you begin to watch it, you will find yourself hating or maybe irritated by the main actor Wikus, either because of his accent or his cheery but condescending demeanor towards the prawns (aliens). But when the shit hits the fan, you will tend to root for the poor sucker as he falls into his abyss of trouble.
If you're the kind of person who is looking for a straight-out alien invasion, or action movie, turn away from District 9, because it is way more than that. As disgustingly gross the aliens are in this movie, you will also see the humans as the enemy, a reflection of humanity's fervent effort to capitalize on resources made available to them. District 9 poses, forgive me if I may sound pretentious, a question of humanity and what it means to be human, regardless of its relative definition. The movie is about the struggle to survive and our fear of the unknown. We see the humans in the movie find all these unused alien weapons and yet the authorities continue to treat the aliens as uncivilized, unintelligent, scum of the universe, which do not deserve rights as a being of intelligence and culture should receive.
What is humanity? Intelligently, culturally and/or morally superior of other species? Looking at the treatment of these aliens in the movie and even people of relative culture, ethnicity and gender in our real lives, does it make us really human? Another recent film addressed similar ideas - James Cameron's Avatar. But you become easily overwhelmed by the graphical nature of that film. And seriously, humanoid-cat looking aliens...making out...gross. Whereas District 9 is not afraid to get down and dirty. The aliens in this movie were not meant to be beautiful in any way, neither was the land they occupied utopic. So if you're not afraid to re-consider what humanity has become through the years, pick-up a copy of District 9 and decide for yourself.
