Hansel: District 9

I appreciate the social commentary of District 9 in their parallels with apartheid and xenophobia in general, but I think the filmmakers went about doing it in a way that almost took their credibility. The film gets a tad silly and hard to take seriously at times, particularly involving cat food for exchange. Silliness aside, I would like to address the message of the film that I enjoyed noting: xenophobia. The film shows how easy it is to despise a race of people because their customs and appearance. In the film, humans disown the aliens because of their appearance and behavior that humans found objectionable. This aspect obviously mirrors our idea of races and how cultural difference can separate societies. If we had looked past the differences, we would have cooperated with the prawns in order to better society in harmony with them. Instead, because of their ghastly cultural differences, we banish them and force them to a distinct part of the world. The parallels with the aliens fit well many a time, in my opinion. However, the Christopher Johnson story was hard to take seriously in the sense that he looks like a giant cricket but expresses sympathy, intelligence, and human body language and traits. In addition Christopher’s son was anything but cute and adorable. I realize that is the point the filmmakers tried to make, but I think science fiction writers must be careful when they make films that speak so much about society because they are bound by the fine line between silliness and respectable satire. Perhaps District 9 is supposed to be campy in some way, but they did not make it totally clear. The mockumentary style of film making was very creative and made the film much more entertaining to watch. It makes it more believable in a sense that if we were actually living through it, we would be viewing the story through media. In my opinion, this is one of the best formats for a socially topical film like this. It works for any film, however. I particularly remember from 2008, Quarantine being quite the scary film because of it's video camera plot style.

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