Prawns Among Us

As a long time fan of science fiction, I'd like to believe that I've seen a lot of crazy shit in that genre. From the big budget blockbusters in Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogy to old school sci-fi like Tron and even TV series like Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and Fringe. I've seen all of these and I'd like to consider myself a pseudo-expert on the subject. Therefore when I heard that LOTR director Petr Jackson was going to produce a new sci-fi film called District 9, I was curious about how this new offering would shape up.

In 1982, a large alien ship arrive on Earth and settled above Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens from the ship were discovered to be malnourished, leaderless, and generally undesirable. They were eventually forcefully removed from their ship and relocated to an area in Joburg called District 9. Over the course of two decades, the aliens (derogatorily called "prawns") have turned District 9 into a slum. The South African governments assigns a private military contractor named Multinational United (MNU) to evict the prawns from their dwelling and relocated again to smaller, even less familiar territory. Leading the MNU team is Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlton Copley), who has spent most of his career behind a desk. While evicting the aliens, Wikus accidentally stumbles upon a canister that one of the alien scientists (whom the MNU people have called Christopher Johnson) has been using to extract fuel. Exposure to the canister affects Wikus' physiology, suddenly making him the most wanted man on the planet.

Director Neill Blomkamp definitely takes some risks with District 9. In interviews, he said that he chose to set his film in South Africa as that is where he grew up and it is indeed fascinating to see a science fiction setting that is not in the United States or the United Kingdom. There are of course undercurrents of racial tension in post-apartheid South Africa, and placing the prawns there certainly doesn't decrease that tension. By turning the old "alien invasion" formula on its head, instead placing the aliens on Earth forcibly and treating them like second class citizens, Blomkamp provides social commentary on how racism continues to rear its ugly head worldwide.

Copley's Wikus does come across as the everyman who is forced to go on the run, resorting to such disgusting acts that he himself once made fun of. The desperation on his face as he pleads with the prawns and tries to reconnect with his wife is also palpable. Making the aliens prawn-like and unintelligible save through subtitles only enhances the experience of seeing them as less than human, and thus expendable.

The main draw of this film for me is that the filmmakers made the presence of a hovering alien spaceship and aliens among humans seem like an everyday occurrence. It was as if they had really been there for two decades already, and everyone had gotten used to their presence. The "dirty" special effects also add to the illusion of realism that Blomkamp and the special effects crew wanted. Clearly, there is a place for sci-fi epics like the ones mentioned earlier. However, District 9 proves that, thankfully, there are still new and exciting stories waiting to be told within the genre.