District 9 is a South African science fiction film that was released back in 2009. The film is set in the South African capital, Johannesburg, where the arrival of aliens invokes widespread hysteria among the city’s inhabitants. As a means to segregate the aliens from the human population, the city of Johannesburg adopts a system of an internment camp. However, they go as far as conducting live dissections of the aliens to extract their DNA and test their weapons. The film follows the progress of the MNU’s mission to relocate the aliens, which becomes disastrous as the commander himself gets infected by alien technology. Like all other films, District 9 undoubtedly serves an entertainment purpose to its audience. Nevertheless, the film presents many relevant themes that are analogous to various social issues embedded in world history concerning the marginalization of different social groups. In fact, the film serves as a representation of the long history of institutionalized racial discrimination that occurred in South Africa during the apartheid.

The film plays an effective role in illustrating the reasons and basis for the occurrence of ostracizing individuals within a given society. In the film, the aliens are representative of the wide range of social groups in world history that have encountered institutionalized discrimination, such as immigrants and indigenous peoples in most western nations. They are portrayed by their grotesque appearances and behavior purposely to reinforce the level of despise that the human characters in the film have towards the aliens. This can compare with the race riots that took place in Detroit during 1943 as a result of the massive migrations of black Americans from the rural south into the city. This incident essentially happened because of the indifferences between white and black populations of the city. At the same time, the film also shows a scene where human activists stage a protest in support of the aliens prior to the MNU carrying out their mission. Likewise, some white Americans, such as the Quakers, helped to emancipate slaves during the American slave trade.

On a more severe level, the film also depicts how the human populations inflict atrocities on the aliens. For example, various acts by MNU officials in opening fire on unarmed aliens that seem uncooperative blatantly demonstrate an excessive use of force, which we can relate to the comment that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from Birmingham jail about how he witnessed white law enforcement officers “curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill his black brothers and sisters with impunity”. The illegal experiments conducted on the aliens, such as the vivisections, are even more outrageous, almost like the massive killings that Spanish colonialists carried out on indigenous Americans during the formative stage of Latin America.

In conclusion, the many events that take place in District 9 have a distinctive connection to numerous real-world events involving the alienation of particular populations. Below is a link below to one of the film trailers of District 9. The gist of the trailer actually expresses the film’s themes very clearly, but according to my observations, the trailer does appear to create an evident bias, since it focuses on the discontent that the human characters feel towards the aliens. Unlike the film where the protagonists and antagonists are actually ambiguous, the trailer seems to incline the film’s viewers towards antagonizing the aliens. However, feel free to let me know what you think.