BREAKING NEWS: Alien Mothership Sighted in the Skies Over France
“To everyone’s surprise, the ship didn’t come to a stop…over Manhattan or Washington or Chicago..but instead coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg.”
These opening words quickly establish that District 9 is going to be a much different film than other Science fiction alien movies that appear at the multiplex where the spaceship only stops over an American city. The shift to South Africa lays the groundwork for a film that explores complex issues related to politics, racism and is not content with being just another Sci-fi movie that is a battle between aliens and humans.
District 9 opens in a mockumentary fashion and interviews a few people who outline the early days of the alien arrival. The spaceship arrived back in 1982 and halted over Johannesburg. We learn that for 3 months the spaceship didn’t do anything, just remained suspended over the city. There was no first contact, no bright lights or any other events depicted in other Sci-fi films. It was humans who had to fly up to the spaceship and force entry. Once inside the spaceship, humans found malnourished aliens, creatures that were lean and starving. The appearance of the aliens as physically weak in District 9 is a deviation from conventional films. In other Sci-fi films and TV Shows, aliens are always shown to be strong and in some cases beautiful even if the aliens are arriving from a planet with no resources (food/water).
In District 9, once the aliens were extracted from the ship, they were placed in a camp
named after the film’s title. The film them jumps to 2010, 28 years later, when it is decided that the aliens have to be relocated far away from the city centre. The contract for the alien relocation is given to Multi-National United (MNU) and Wikus (Sharlto Copley) goes along with a camera crew and the rest of the MNU team for a grand eviction event. Things don’t go as expected and Wikus becomes infected with alien fluid. This results in an alien mutation in him, a common theme in the Sci-fi genre, but with a twist. It turns out that the alien weapons can only be fired by the aliens because it requires their DNA. When Wikus gets infected, he can start firing the alien weapons that MNU had been unable to do for a long time. Naturally, he becomes a valuable commodity to MNU who want to conduct experiments on him. Wikus escapes but is a marked person and in the ultimate irony, he can only find a safe spot in District 9, the same slum-like camp where he was involved with the eviction of the aliens.