by Justin Roberts
Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9” has quickly risen in popularity at the box-office since its release on August 14th, but considering its vague commercials, what is it about exactly?

20 years ago, an alien ship appeared above the city of Johannesburg, South Africa.  Inside, they find aliens near death, stranded from a lack of fuel and supplies.  A company by the name of Multi National United, or MNU, “rescues” the aliens (nicknamed Prawns by the Johannesburg civilians) and uses them for labor and probe them for more advanced weaponry.

The film begins as a documentary of a newly promoted employee, Wikus van de Merwe, and his first assignment to relocate the Prawns to a poorly disguised concentration camp outside of Johannesburg.  As the movie builds, Wikus gets more and more tied up with the Prawns as he mutates into one himself.  The film is well paced and surprisingly down-to-earth; disregarding the fantasy of alien visitors, it mirrors past racial issues from around the world, such as the holocaust.  However, it is a bit bizarre and people with little imagination and no tolerance for fiction will likely not enjoy this film.

Although District 9 will likely call to mind visions of emaciated Jews and concentration camps to teens, older people in the audience may recall something different.  The film tells of a similar South African incident from the 1970’s.  In Cape Town, 60,000 of its multiracial (white) residents were forced out of their homes after the government deemed them slums.  Similar to the Prawn ghettos of District 9, District 6 was a crime den declared as a “whites only” area by the then regime, the main reason being the apartheid philosophy of racial separation.