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"This guy is obviously... he's a little bit sharper, ja?"

*** Contains minor spoilers ***

I watched District 9 again last night. In this entertaining science fiction movie, an alien space ship has broken down and is hovering over Johannesburg, while the aliens who arrived in the ship are living in a slum-like community beneath it, cut off from their civilization and exposed to human mistreatment.

While the film is entirely watchable as a well-made action flick, the parallels it draws between this fictional scenario and real-world racism in general – and South African apartheid in particular – are anything but subtle. This metaphor is developed as the central theme in the first half the movie, shot documentary-style, before the action plot and CGI robot battles take center stage. Critics are somewhat divided over how well this fusion between action and social commentary works on screen, but they almost unanimously attest to the film’s “intelligence” and “ambitious narrative”.

In the reviews that I have read however, the critics remain very vague in their analysis of the movie’s oh-so-intelligent social commentary. They seem to be undecided whether the film is a political satire or a metaphor with an anti-racist message, two similar but still somewhat different interpretations. I think the socio-political content of District 9 deserves a closer look.

If the scenario is metaphorical, what then is the movie’s precise message? Through the eyes of the main character – a naive white bureaucrat who suddenly finds himself at the center of the human-alien conflict, we come to see beyond the aliens’ insect-like appearance and discover that they are not that different from us humans after all. The Blackwater-esque private army MNU (“Multi National United”) in charge of moving the aliens from their ghetto into a concentration camp are revealed as the bad guys, and naturally our hero fights them alongside the aliens.

A very general political message can be interpreted: we shouldn’t hate what we don’t understand, we should respect everyone’s (even the aliens’) human rights, etc. This would have been a revolutionary message about 50 years ago. Or quite possibly it is still a visionary revelation for most white South Africans.

But the problems with this interpretation of the story as a parable of real-world racism and persecution go beyond the obsoleteness of the message. For example, the aliens in District 9 start out as foreign, and likely hostile intruders – any xenophobe will happily acknowledge parallels between this scenario and real-world ethnic conflict.

Moreover, the aliens in District 9 (derogatorily referred to as “prawns”) are – with a few exceptions – portrayed as animalistic, less-than-intelligent subhumans. They completely fulfill the stereotypes attributed to them by the movie’s “specieist” stand-ins for real-world racists. (One could argue that the aliens obviously stem from a far advanced civilization, and speculate that their behavior is merely prompted by the hostile environment they find themselves in – but this ham-fisted interpretation of subtleties has to take a backseat when, in the graphical final action scene of the movie, a group of aliens violently rip apart the main bad guy and devour his flesh on the spot.) In the film’s very intentional metaphor, these uncivilized beings stand for non-white South Africans under apartheid – not a flattering comparison, to say the very least.

The film also falls short of being satire. While District 9 is comical at times, its realism and the overall sincerity of its plot simply don’t allow for that interpretation. Too close to reality is the picture painted of South African society, where all positions of power are held by white people, and the seedy fast food joint “Günter’s” near the alien slum is frequented exclusively by black South Africans. The movie features only two powerful black men; one is the American CEO of MNU (the bad guys), the other is the leader of a Nigerian gang (the other bad guys).

In a full-on parody, surely humans of all ethnicities would unite against their common enemy in a post-racial society, and the aliens, not a private army, really would be the bad guys; a concept brilliantly executed by Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers”.

Instead, the movie works as a provocative piece. The parallels drawn between the violent subhuman alien intruders and real-world persecuted ethnicities are deeply troubling, intendedly so or not. The fact that in the film, an all-black Nigerian gang symbiotically co-exists with the aliens in their slum, complete with inter-species sex and cannibalistic rituals, is especially cringe-worthy. The conscious viewer has to acknowledge the movie’s racist undertones critically, and by extension the racism still widely in existence in the real world.