by DAVID SMITH, M&G
Poor aliens. They trek halfway across the galaxy, run out of petrol and end up living off cat food in, of all places, 1980s Johannesburg. Then they get the kind of reception that asylum seekers who don’t speak the language have come to expect.
This is the improbable premise of the surprise sci-fi hit of the year. District 9 shot to the top of the United States box office in its opening weekend and earned the kind of reviews that eluded George Lucas — even the first time around. Its modest credentials include a 29-year-old debutant director, a budget of just $30-million and a cast of unknowns.
But District 9 also boasts two points of instant recognition. Its producer is Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings films and King Kong. Its setting is apartheid-style South Africa, a time and place that seems both close and yet distant, a paradox that filmmakers are now finding irresistible. Improbably, the traumas suffered as a result of South Africa’s white-minority rule have now become one of cinema’s most fertile territories.
The warped society apartheid created will be examined in a rugby film about Nelson Mandela, the story of photographers capturing township violence and the startling real-life account of a black girl born to white parents. As a result, Hollywood stars — including Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Phillippe, John Malkovich and Sophie Okonedo — have been crowding the arrivals halls at South Africa’s airports. The gold rush comes 15 years after Africa’s most powerful nation held its first democratic election and on the eve of the biggest sporting event in its history.
Of all the new releases, District 9 wears its politics most lightly, making no mention of apartheid or its legacy in today’s impoverished black townships. But the allegorical overtones are inescapable in the plot about aliens who, their spaceship stranded above Johannesburg, have to endure a daily routine of unemployment, gangsterism and xenophobia in a squalid shantytown. The Prawns — as they are known in derogatory slang because of their vaguely crustacean appearance — spend their hopeless days brawling and getting high on pet food.
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