Be at Politics

I went to see District 9 this weekend in The Electric cinema. It is the new sci-fi film everybody is raving about. It is a South African movie about an alien space ship that gets stranded above Johannesburg. The South Africans put the aliens in a camp / slum in district 9 outside Johannesburg. The aliens get out of control and the government sets up a plan to deport all the aliens to a concentration camp in the desert. A civil servant is given the task to lead the deportation. And as most civil servants do, he does the job thoroughly and according to the bureaucratic rules (immediately you think of Eichmann, who started a similar job some 60 years ago). Of course everything goes massively wrong and there the movie turns into a proper sci-fi / action movie. The action is brilliantly done, very grim and dark but not too bloody.

The first 15 minutes of the movie give you the feeling that the intention of the director is to address the concepts of apartheid and immigration. But I think most reviewers want the film to be more then it is. Probably because it isn’t a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster but a South-African film with a South-African hero, who isn’t a real hero to begin with. It is a good movie though and the theme is very relevant in many countries at the moment: are we willing to take in strangers and how much can we take.

Go and see it!