by Brenda W. Clough
I am as I so often am, rather late to see this movie, which came out in 2009. (My son, who is embarrassed by the cultural ignorance of his parents, insisted that we take it in.) Better late than never! District 9 has nearly everything to delight the SFnal heart — it won the Bradbury award for that year. There are space ships and aliens and battle bots; there are honking-big ray guns and quests for ET to go home. It has the commentary on modern society that keeps it from being a mere space opera, and it is properly constructed: things keep on getting worse!
What doesn’t it have? It doesn’t have cute aliens. They are in fact delightfully creepy and uncuddly.Good! Even better, it does not have your standard Hollywood movie stars. Benedict Cumberbatch is not in it! All the actors look like real people; they have ordinary noses and no Botox. It is not set in southern California, nor in the US at all. Very good! Let’s get a little variety into our cinema; the world is wide. The setting is fantabulously depressing and downtrodden; this is not LOTR. More importantly, it is culturally not the United States. This is a South African movie, something that only a South African could have made. Apartheid and discrimination against aliens as a prejudice that all human races can get behind is a scary and trenchant depiction of human beings, because it just feels so likely.
The complaints? Yeah, I can see why the Nigerian government has a complaint. A good chunk of the villainy is supplied by a criminal gang of Nigerians of vividly dubious sanity. However, white people (in the form of the brutal and corrupt multinational paramilitary organization) make up the other half of the villain roster, so it is not entirely unfair. All nationalities and ethnicities have to take their turn in the evil-mastermind barrel — yes, even you, Kim Jong-Un. You know that your ethnic group has really arrived in pop culture when you get the twisted tech genius roles. I am Chinese; we have been wily Orientals for a century now.
There were distant rumblings about a sequel, which after all these years now I think must be trapped in pre-development hell. This is also perfectly fine. There is no need (please!) for every movie to be a trilogy. This film stands fine on its own.
The ebook version of my novel How Like a God is now available from Book View Cafe. And it is available now in an audio book edition which is read by Bronson Pinchot!
My newest novel Speak to Our Desires is out from Book View Café.
I also have stories in Book View Café’s two steampunk anthologies, The Shadow Conspiracy and The Shadow Conspiracy II, as well as in BVC’s many other anthologies, including our latest, Beyond Grimm.
