District 9 is an alternate history docudrama where an alien mother ship appears over Johannesburg South Africa during the eighties. The aliens (referred to as the Prawn due to their looks) are isolated from the general public in an area known as District 9. The film focuses on the social and cultural relation between the humans and the prawn as well as adding some action and science fiction events.
Wikus van de Merwe (the protagonist of the film) is an employee at Multinational United (MNU) – a private weapons company that the South African government has turned to for dealing with the Prawn – who is placed in charge of the eviction operation that aims on moving all the Prawn to District 10 (a camp located 200 miles from Johannesburg to which Wikus refers as a “concentration camp”.). During the eviction process, Wikus gets some alien “fuel” (a black slimy substance formed by processing material from alien technology) on his face. This alien fuel messes with his genetic make up and causes him to become a human/Prawn hybrid.
Wikus’s transformation allows him to use Prawn technology (which is sensitive to Prawn DNA), see the Prawn from a completely differnt perspective and at the same time be a target for MNU (and possibly hundreds of other corporations). His views about the Prawn at the start of the film compared to his views at the end are completely differnt from each other. At the start, he views them as dumb aliens who have a love for catfood (he even calls for the extermination of an alien hive during the eviction process), whereas at the end of the film he sees them as living beings that have a right to live.
One of the major themes of the film was the way the local (mainly black) South African population treated the Prawn. Many years of being ‘crushed’ under the rule of the “whiteman” has turned the local blacks into similar creatures as those who step on them. They treat the Prawn almost the same way they themselves were treated by the whites. The whitemen on the other hand (especially MNU) wants to turn the aliens technology into profit.
Glimpses of signs separating the Prawn from humans in public areas are seen throughout the film. These signs bare similarity to those that was used to sparate the whites from the colours in America and South Africa during the times of race inequality.
District 9 is a film that shows that the darker side of the human race can also evolve and spread as time progresses foreward, even if we live along with the aliens, we will still view ourselves as the greater beings and the aliens (even if they are more advanced than us) as the lesser “opportunities”. However, District 9 isn’t the only example in media where humanity views itself as the superiority of the universe.
In a alternate world far far away (the expanded Star Wars universe), we can see even more extreme examples of human superiority. The Galactic Empire is famous for it’s non-human protocols and ideologies (also known as the Human High Culture) stating that forebid aliens from gaining high ranks within the Empire (with the exception of Admiral Thrawn). Although not as extreme as the Empire, District 9 also shows the viewers that we too aren’t that far away from the “Dark Side” as we believe we are.
