Any metaphor where marginalized people are represented by something nonhuman is a deeply flawed place to start from, but District 9 is interesting enough to make it worth criticizing anyway.
Twenty-some years ago, an alien mothership essentially broke down over Johannesburg. When nothing happened for a few months, humans busted it open to find the surviving aliens inside had become refugees, starving and needy. Enclosing these aliens in slums turned into a generational problem. Now a local organization is responsible for “evicting” the aliens and relocating them to a concentration camp 200km north of Jo’burg.
District 9 is essentially told from the perspective of Wikus van der Merwe, a bureaucrat in charge of the legal procedural elements of this relocation. One morning he’s merrily genociding the unborn children of the aliens; within hours, he becomes a fugitive.
From a filmmaking standpoint, I have no complaints. I love the world building in the front half of the film. Fake documentary is a delightful format. Foreshadowing with interviews is such a fun way to build tension and grow that sweet, sweet curiosity gap. The back half is such an exciting action movie!
This was not a particularly high budget movie ($30 million in 2009, compared to Avatar’s $237 million), but they made very good use of it. The CGI holds up well. The physical effects are disgusting. I love every revolting minute. And can we talk about how they made insect-like aliens so freakin cute? Those pedipalps sure emote.
It’s hard to get past the metaphor, though. Even though I think it’s a really easy flaw to engage with. I’ve written books that did similar, without intending to say “marginalized people are werewolves,” but I think this is something that someone who comes out of a society’s dominant caste is much likelier to do than the marginalized, yeah?
There *is* something different between aliens/humans (or werewolves/humans), but in reality, humans do this to humans who are not different. We invent lines to fabricate excuses to treat each other terribly. And then we, as creators, decide it’s easier to tell this story with some metaphoric Other to overcome the biases that prevent us from humanizing humans. It’s a problem. I’m not equipped to evaluate whether we can place the blame for this flaw on the stories when they are reflecting the problems of the societies they grow out of.
If nothing else, District 9 isn’t lazy about the metaphor. The characterization of Wikus as a selfish, horrible human is marvelously consistent to the point that I think the filmmaker understood what a bad person he was portraying.
It’s also true that members of a dominant caste are never “safe” from the violence they enact on the marginalized. Wikus’s evolution into an alien hybrid could be compared to what happens when a member of the professional class becomes profoundly disabled. No longer is this person protected. They become “a body” subject to all the same injustices as anyone else. Wikus was married to the daughter of one of the executives making these calls and it still wasn’t enough to protect him.
There are no good humans in this movie. Wikus is given depth–he’s a wife guy, which butts up against endearing until he fokkin destroys all those fetal aliens–but the only characters who behave like protagonists are Christopher Johnson (the lead alien) and his adorable son, whose “humanity” are unfaltering.
It’s sorta fun having an action movie where you’re happy to see all the humans meet terrible, blasty deaths, and Christopher Johnson gives us a reason to remain invested until the end. I wish we had gotten a sequel three years later when he returned. I like to think the movie could have been a complex political thriller about the diplomacy that would unfold between aliens and humans when they’re on more equal footing.
I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about District 9 sixteen years later; aside from my reservations with the metaphor on a fundamental level, I think it held up very well. I’d prefer watching this to James Cameron’s contemporary Dances With Wolves a thousand times over. It’s nauseatingly relevant to 2025 America. And there’s a cool sequence with a mecha.
(image credit: Sony Pictures)