20 July 2023

District 9 (2009)

Writer-director Neill Blomkamp (Demonic) shines a satirical spotlight on his home country in the Oscar-nominated alternative history sci-fi film, District 9.

In 1982, when a spaceship lands in Johannesburg, South Africa, the apartheid government confines over one million of its sickly alien passengers to a “refugee” camp called District 9. Twenty-eight years later, the government hires weapons manufacturer MultiNational United (MNU) to head up the forced removal of the aliens, now nicknamed Prawns, from their “filthy, lawless slum” to a new location. It’s a dirty job that gets kicked down the line until MNU executive Piet Smit (Louis Minnaar, Pa) assigns it to his son-in-law, Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, Ted K), a bumbling bureaucrat. Thanks, nepotism!

As removal looms, one of the aliens, Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), becomes desperate to grab the last opportunity to flee Earth along with his son. And when he and Wikus collide, Wikus gets an in-your-face lesson about what life is really like for the despised refugees, thanks to a mutagen that starts transforming him into a Prawn. Wikus goes on the run to escape vivisection in a lab, but there’s only one place where he can hide from the full force of government propaganda and murderous mercenary Colonel Kobus Venter (David James, Sew the Winter to My Skin) as his rights and privileges are stripped away: District 9.

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