Apartheid for Aliens

Courtesy of TriStar Pictures In the new sci-fi feature “District 9,” a spaceship lands on Johannesburg. And the only thing scarier than the invaders are the humans.

It’s been a good year for science fiction at the movies. In one sense, it always is, of course.Somewhere between the deafening fusillade of the latest Terminator movie and tumbling havoc of the latest Transformers, beleaguered audience members may dimly remember a kind of movie that wasn’t adapted from a game or turned into toy, but the moment quickly passes.

They may even remember another, more distant time when science fiction didn’t mean killer cyborgs and laser guns. It meant Jules Verne and H. G. Wells pressing the fast-forward button on the industrial revolution to see what happened next; it meant Isaac Asimov devising an ethics system for robots, and Arthur C. Clarke predicting the existence of geostationary communications satellites. It meant the night sweats of Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs, and—at the movies—2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, the first Alien movie, Blade Runner.

District 9 is an anti-apartheid movie for little green men. They are a mangy set of curs, too—hunched insectoids who scavenge for food and urinate on street corners.

That sci-fi—the more thoughtful, contemplative strain—is having a good year. First we got Moon, Duncan Jones’s haunting film about a space janitor slowly unraveling on the dark side of the moon. Now we have District 9, another first feature, from South African director Neill Blomkamp, under the helm of producer Peter Jackson, who after funding for Blomkamp’s debut feature fell apart, dug into his own pockets and encouraged the 30-year-old director to make something closer to home.

The opening shots of District 9 show Blomkamp’s native Johannesburg languishing beneath the shadow of a giant spaceship: 20 years ago, it rolled up, ran out of gas and has been parked there ever since. Its crew, meanwhile, live just below it, in a quarantined slum, surrounded by barbed wire, known as District 9. The military patrol the perimeter; human rights lawyers protest the legality of their incarceration; the local townsfolk, meanwhile, just want the “prawns’—as they are derisively called—gone. “If they were from another country you’d understand,” explains one weary Afrikaaner, to a documentary crew. “But they’re not even from our planet.”

As ideas go this is a beauty. It took certain type of surly ingenuity to imagine that when aliens finally made contact with us,they might do so not in a blaze of music and lights, or rocket fire and laser-guns, inspiring neither peace nor war, but instead would take up residence in the same sump of mistrust and resentment with which immigrants have been treated since time immemorial.

District 9 is an anti-apartheid movie for little green men. They are a mangy set of curs, too—hunched insectoids who scavenge for food and urinate on street corners—although that’s nothing compared to the humans in the movie, who line up to represent the forces of bigotry and intolerance, led from the front by a tightly-wound bureaucrat with a clipboard, Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) whose job it is to move the aliens from District 9 to a more tightly-policed camp, just outside the city. Any resemblance to the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto or the creation of the Soweto townships is, of course, purely coincidental.

The movie’s satirical sights are no less powerful for being so glancing. There’s real bite to the sequence in which Der Merwe goes from shack to shack, all officious smiles and nervy threats, attempting to get the aliens’ clawprint on the relevant eviction notices. Audiences may be surprised, however, to find this nervous petty official turning into the movie’s hero. After receiving a spray of alien gunk to the face, der Merwe turns home to find black goo leaking from his nose, passes out and wakes up in the hospital with a giant alien claw sprouting from his arm.

I’m sorry, but there’s no kind way of breaking that to you. Nor is there any acting class in the world that can prep you for it; as Copley gives us his best guess as to how he might feel to wake up one day with a giant alien claw sprouting from his arm (hoisted eyebrows, dropped jaw, a blizzard of “fok”s), I felt a wave of giggles spread throughout the cinema, and some of the film’s promise begin slowly to evaporate.