Movie- District 9

District 9 was up for an Oscar as best picture. It did not win.

The premise of District 9 (2009) seems like your basic sci-fi feature film. Aliens are marooned on earth, with their large craft permanently parked over Johannesburg, South Africa. The bug like aliens are stranded, and at first earth welcomes them, but then humanity, being fickle as we are, starts to turn against them. And this is where the concept of District 9 gets interesting.

The aliens, though obviously sentient beings, with great technology, are rounded up and made to live in a shanty town. They for years have established their own culture here, when the government decides to round them up again, and give them even more inhospitable land to live on, all perfectly legal of course, done with laws and regulations and all that. In charge of this move is bureaucrat Wikus, and man so consumed by dotting the i and crossing the t that he loses sight of what is happening.

Now the social content of this movie is pretty plain to see. And the setting is not a coincidence, because it reminds us of apartheid, and Native Americans, and gays and dozens of other ethnic or racial groups done in by the laws of the majority. And while I applaud this social relevance in a sci-fi movie, I also felt like they hit us over the head with it too often and too hard. A couple of times I even said, "OK OK, I get it!" as I was watching it.

It gets even more interesting as Wikus, the persecutor of the prawns (as the aliens are nicknamed) starts turning into one in a real sci-fi twist. He becomes one of the persecuted.

District 9 was a good movie, and that is was really an unknown, and did so well, still makes us feel we are not the captives of the studio marketing machines. But really, if the Oscars had not expanded the best picture category to 10 nominees, would this film even be considered on any one's short list? It seemed like the Academy was screaming, "We are so cool, look at what kind of film we now have nominated."

I can say the creators of the film were able to fuse the sci-fi with social relevance pretty well, and it was fun watching it. And it was a great step out of the dark that scvi-fi sometimes dwells in. But I would never seriously think it a contender for best picture.