District 9 – Not about aliens, at all
January 20, 2010mike Comments Off
In case you didn’t know Peter Jackson (King Kong, Lord of the Rings), producer of District 9, has said the movie is about aliens, and may I be the first to inform him, its not. And let me also be the first to say if Peter Jackson really thinks the movie is about aliens perhaps Neill Blomkamp should have chosen a different producer.
District 9 is about xenophobia, segregation and powerful defense contractors. I think we all know that. So much so that District 9 set in Johannesburg, South Africa is based on a real place and a real dilemma in District Six in Cape Town, South Africa. They didn’t even do more than invert the number and roll with it. The themes in the film are very interesting and may be best told with an “alien” as the subject of our xenophobia. I highly recommend you see it for yourself rather then me ruin the plot for you!
Alien movies: Peter Jackson, alien movies are movies like the cleverly named “Alien” and also Independence Day. Pete, if an alien ship came down to Earth and hovered over a city, we wouldn’t let it last there for 20 minutes before we would have nuked the thing back to Alpha Centauri or wherever the hell it came from! The last thing that would happen if aliens came would be let their misunderstood ship hover over our city for twenty years, while we let its inhabitants hang out in the slums and eat cat food! Mr. Jackson, its what they call in literary expression, a “metaphor” and our friend Neill didn’t leave much of the metaphor to our imagination since he named the movie after a real place he was telling the story about!
But enough about aliens, which this movie is not, check out the movie and look into the back story a bit, its quite interesting!