District 9

Ted and Maya are huge science fiction fans, so we went to see District 9 on Friday night.  In case you haven’t heard, District 9 is the apartheid tale  of a group of aliens who find themselves stranded in Johannesburg for the past 20 years.  Humans are afraid of them, so they’ve been sent to live in abhorrent conditions outside of Johannesburg proper, conditions where crime runs rampant, and the aliens learn that humans are not to be trusted in the least.  Watching the gangs and violence portrayed by the aliens, and the dismissive racism (speciesism?) portrayed by the humans, is a grim reminder of what humans are capable of.  Not a pretty picture.

But the aliens are not all evil, and neither are the humans.  All are complex, and judging a book by its cover is always a mistake.  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on this review, because the fun is wrapped up in the surprises.  Instead, I will say that it is a wonderful, thoughtful, horribly violent film with a ‘hard R’ rating, one that is not appropriate for young kids and where the ‘F word’ is thrown about quite liberally.  Actually, I was not only afraid to let Maya see it, I was afraid to see it myself.  She is such a huge sci-fi fan, though, and is not plagued at all by nightmares or such, that we decided it was OK.  And I decided I would see it, too.  I’m glad I did.  The violence is mostly of the exploding head type, and there are no children or women getting abused or maimed, which would have put it beyond the reasonable for me.  However, the people sitting next to me left after an early scene where some alien eggs are ‘aborted’.  So if you have a weak stomach, stay away.

I’m glad we didn’t.  The film turned out to be a lot of fun, with a strong moral core.  The story of the making of the film, for only $30 million dollars, with no big-name actors, is interesting.  I read about it at the vet’s office, in Entertainment Weekly.