From Politics Daily…
District 9 and Racism: a Thoughtful Look Through a Sci-Fi Lens
By Donna Britt
Warning: For the sake of enjoyment, don’t let anybody—even me—tell you too much about the strikingly original new movie District 9. You’ve never seen anything quite like it. Then again, maybe you have.
Have you met anyone who is compassionate and caring—but who drops that warmth like a scalding-hot coffee cup when something sparks his unthinking prejudice? Has an unexpected event ever forced you to see life through the eyes of someone whose feelings—whose humanity—you’ve barely considered? Have you ever marveled at how quickly those who’ve been unfairly discriminated against can become themselves become blindly discriminatory?
If you said “yes” to any of the above, you’ll relate to District 9, a gripping sci-fi thriller that is this summer’s most political popcorn flick. Not only does it boast secret government agendas, violent cultural clashes and brief, gory vaporizations, it’s the perfect movie for an August in which “patriots” demonize and shout down their fellow citizens in the name of freedom.
The basics: A humongous spaceship appears from the heavens to hover, silent and menacing, over modern Johannesburg. Wary scientists board the ship to find it broken and teeming with starving, weakened aliens with no discernible leader or motives for visiting earth. The aliens’ tentacles and scaly appearance earn them the nickname “prawns” by the contemptuous humans who install them in an enormous, barbed-wire shantytown that quickly devolves into a slum.
The newcomers are aliens, but what happens next often occurs when humans confront less-powerful newcomers whose looks and behavior baffle them. The hideous outsiders are ostracized and barred from most businesses. People living near their chaotic camp want more distance. Humanitarians demand that the visitors—who adore cat food, eat garbage and who are largely peaceful despite possessing massive weapons—be treated fairly. Most people just want them gone.
When the government decides to move the interlopers to a more distant settlement, officials puts a desk jockey in who charge unintentionally learns more about the newcomers-and his fellow countrymen—than he ever wanted.
A critical hit, District 9 promises to be like “The Hangover”: a smash whose talented, unknown cast bodes ill for Hollywood stars whose huge salaries no longer guarantee major box office (just ask Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Christian Bale). The movie’s blend of complex ideas, great visuals and stunning special effects-all produced on a comparatively miniscule budget and shot mostly in a Jo’burg landfill—has the Michael Bays of the world quaking.
Even more encouraging: District 9 audiences should leave the theater pondering weightier questions than how many of its stars opted for Botox. In a culture that often prefers its heroes uncomplicated and its bad guys easily distinguishable, characters in District 9 are surprisingly like those in real life.
Every group has its heroes and its jerks—sometimes existing in the same body.
There are the sadistic soldiers who enjoy abusing the largely helpless visitors. There are heartless government officials whose lies are so reflexive, they’ve stopped realizing that they’re lies. The ostensible hero is Wikus van de Merwe (played by gifted newcomer Sharlto Copley), a clueless bureaucrat whose disgust for the creatures he’s relocating is masked by an obsequious grin. Decent enough to protest the creatures’ mistreatment, he’s also cavalier enough not to mind that the “improved” new community he’s pressing them to move to is even worse than their current digs—“more like a concentration camp.”
He’s like lots of people: Unmoved by what happens to unfamiliar “others” until a twist of fate forces him to care. Especially unsettling is the portrayal of a group of cruel, greedy Nigerians who set up shop in the alien’s camp, selling them goods, buying their weapons, and generally exploiting them. It’s no accident that the movie is set in South Africa. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp grew up in Johannesburg during the nation’s white minority rule; the blatant racism and authoritarianism of that time and place shaped his creative vision.
“It all had a huge impact on me,” Blomkamp, 29, told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times. “The white government and the paramilitary police, the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment....
“Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.”
In the movie, black citizens brutalized under apartheid’s tyranny don’t blink when they tell TV reporters that the aliens—whose habits and living conditions are indeed repellent—deserve no rights and should get the hell back to where they came from. Without preaching, District 9 explores the slippery infectiousness of intolerance and every human being’s potential venality.
Philippe Bonhomme is a Silver Spring, Md., accountant and music producer who saw an early screening of District 9 and was surprised when the movie invoked for him the struggle for independence in Haiti, his parents’ birthplace. One of the Caribbean’s most brutal slave colonies, Haiti was for decades ruled by French colonizers who made fortunes from slaves’ unpaid labor and agricultural knowledge.
Haiti’s famed liberator Toussaint l’Ouverture “was educated, a slave who worked as a carriage driver and joined the Spanish army to abolish slavery,” Bonhomme, 24, explained. “The movie’s main character came to learn both sides of the struggle between the humans and the aliens, just as Toussaint l’Ouverture was privileged but saw the devastating effects of oppression on his people.”
Cool. But who goes to a summer sci-fi movie to, well, think? Director Blomkamp told Entertainment Weekly he wasn’t trying to make a movie about apartheid that “beats people over the head. I’m just trying to portray science fiction in a way that feels like it might have actually been real.”
Bonhomme would say he succeeded. “I didn’t expect [District 9] to go as deep as it went, but I’m happy it did,” he said. “A lot of people are going be challenged by this movie. It makes you look at oppression and racism in a different light.
“I was shocked,” Bonhomme said, “but in a good way.”
Me, too. And I can’t remember the last time I could say that about a no-budget summer movie.
1 comment:
Such interesting look into racism, slavery and the workings of the government all mashed into one...I definitely recommend this movie..!!
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