Director Neil Blomkamp may have used the inhuman aliens nicknamed Prawns (with no real species name given) but District 9 is very much about how shitty we humans can treat each other. Set in one of the planet's ultimate bastions of tolerance, Johannesburg, South Africa, District 9 may not have been made in America but it definitely expresses the USA's current feeling that the Statue of Liberty's plaque has been changed from "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breather free" to the all-too-21st Century claim of "No Vacancy"!
Allow me to hit you with the setup first. In roughly 1989 an alien ship appeared over the city of Johannesburg, enormous, silent, seemingly dead. There is video footage of a piece of the ship falling off but search teams never found it. After a month of sitting in the sky, the government decides to cut the hull open. Inside, they find close to a million Prawns all starving to death, unsure of how their ship works or why they are there. The government puts a private military company called Multi-National United (which makes Blackwater USA look like a bunch of girl scouts) in charge of caring for the Prawns and deciphering their technology.
With their numbers swelled to 2.1 million in 2009, the Prawns are set to be transferred out of their shithole shantytown, District 9, to a tent-city with a concentration camp feel. Enter Wikus Van De Merwe, a hapless MNU bureaucrat put in charge of the relocation because he is married to an MNU official's daughter. Wikus, played brilliantly by South African born Sharlto Copley, jovially berates and taunts the Prawns as if he is on a simple hunting trip when he is really leading a raiding party into District 9 to force the Prawns to sign away their rights.
Watch the scene where he says to a colleague "Have a souvenir from your first Prawn abortion!" and tell me you didn't retch. That's when he picks up a piece of Prawn technology that sprays him with alien fuel which begins turning him into a Human/Prawn hybrid.
As Wikus goes on the run from MNU, he discovers what is blatantly obvious to the audience at that point - being dehumanized by the enemy sucks. But that is District 9's take home message, we fear what is different and "alien". We dehumanize enemies to the point where we delight in their mistreatment. While the Prawns are not human, they were the tried, the poor, the wretched masses begging humanity for help and we treated them worse than the ETs from Alien Nation. But watching the MNU sweep District 9, you can easily replace the Prawns with black South Africans, American Indians, Jews, Muslims or even homosexuals. Look at the main poster for the movie... law enforcement stopped using targets that look like real people years ago because it wasn't PC. But humans have no problem using the Prawns for direct target practice.
OK enough of that deep crap, the movie is also freaking cool! Great blend of action and suspense and Sci-Fi. Watch the climactic finale that includes a Prawn battle suit and tell me it wasn't worth the $8 for a ticket.
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