I wanted to remark on your comment about Blomkamp's special variety of revisionist South African history (or, at least, highly edited history). As it turns out, Blomkamp is only 29 years old, meaning he was only about 10 years old when apartheid ended, and his famnily relocated to Vancouver when he was 18. So, he neither had much experience of "actual" apartheid in SA nor did he really experience post-apartheid SA. There's a lot of literature out there on South Africa's younger generation and how distant they are in their political consciousness from SA's history of apartheid. I think the hit-or-miss nature of his film's apartheid allegory is characteristic of his generation. That's not an apology, just an observation. It might also explain the carelessness with which he depicted black South Africans in District 9. He clearly has a strong sense of the collective guilt that most contemporary Afrikaaners bear, but it's a guilt that is kind of generic, a bit misinformed, not very nuanced. In a lot of ways, I think it resembles the kind of post-racism attitude you see in Southern whites born after, say, 1970. They (we) accept, unreflectively, that racism is a "bad" thing, but still don't have a comprehensive grasp of the complex phenomenology of non-legal racism.

So, what I liked about the film really had to do more with the analogy between racism and speciesism, and the way in which Blomkamp problematized the question of "the human." I liked it because it upset the intuition (that a lot of people have) that "racism" is a natural and inevitable consequence of different human groups coming into contact with one another. Blomkamp's film shows, I think, that the problem is not human differences– which can be oversome, as was ostensibly the case with the downfall of apartheid– but rather the problem is a certain attitude toward and about "difference" that can be remolded and activated against whomever or whatever comes to occupy the place of the "Other."

In my post I claimed that South Africa is familiar, and in a certain sense it is since we hear and read a lot about it. But we don't see it much, and it may be that such films are appealing because they convey massive amounts of visual information about *visually* unfamiliar places. We get to see what slums look like without being made too uncomfortable about our own relative wealth: call it cinematic poverty tourism.

I do think they're both parasitic, but I think that the Obama poster could have supplied amelioration in the form of a de-icon-ification of the President's image. As things have developed, it now looks like the original artist was basically calling Obama an Uncle Tom for picking Rahm Emmanuel, so much of that potential destabilization of the image is lost.

I agree with Steve that the Nigerians are a mirror of MNU. (I said so in the original post) I also agree that Thomas, the black trainee, is the most innocent character.

However, I think the comparison to _The Wire_ is telling: if we consider how much more fully fleshed out the ethnically diverse characters are in The Wire, we can start to see how differently a narrative might treat a fraught racial setting. This is in part because David Simon had a lot of true experiences to draw on, while Neil Blomkamp spent most of his adult life in Canada and was drawing on childhood memories of Johannesburg. Rather than Simon's journalist eye, we get an infantile caricature of the racial dynamic there.

It seems that you both feel that such a caricature can be forgiven for supplying deep insights into the human condition. I'm not sure that "different = bad" counts as such an insight.

I notice that neither of you respond to the way that the biological-inferiority of the 'drone' aliens justifies the South African's racism, and that we're literally presented with a distinct caste of alien who has been operating in secret in order to break that stereotype. Any comments on that aspect of the film?

It should also be noted that the Nigerian warlord CLEARLY is a mirror of MNU (which I love to think is not coincidentally the initials for Manchester United, a little globalization of football in-joke). Wikkus' Father-in-Law clearly wants to a.) use alien weapons to become more powerful b.) merge human and alien together for his own purposes and c.) treat those beneath him as expendable for his own purposes.

In short, the business conglomerate that is supposed to be the cornerstone of "the new South Africa" is just like the Nigerians, EXCEPT with the power to choose to do otherwise with much less consequence.

The dude who's ordered to chop Wikkus' arm off in the Nigerian tent is essentially the same as the white dude at ManU headquarters who forces Wikkus to pull the trigger and kill the alien.

It should also be noted that the LEAST sympathetic characters in the whole movie are the "Executive Outcomes" like mercenaries, who are white. And as Dan pointed out, the person who is the most courageous in the film is actually Wikkus' assistant who blows the whistle on the whole thing and unapologetically does his time for doing so. Let me add, that everyone at MNU treats him like an idiot child the whole film, and it is revealed that this racist attitude is unjustified as it is the racists who are incompetent morons. His stealing of their files so easily is reminiscent of South Africa's recent episode where nuclear material was VERY nearly stolen out of one of their facilities. Despite their unjustified racism towards that guy, AND their utter incompetence, the only decent, intelligent person still ends up IN PRISON.

As for the elements of the complicated history of how racism actually played out in Africa, it seems to me that you presume that a) the film is not "being parasitic" (others might use the term "utilizing," but they'd have to be interested in being charitable critics) on a familiar racial dynamic to say something challenging generally about human nature and/or b) that it is somehow possible to give an account of these added complexities and still tell a watchable story in two hours and/or c.) that the upshot of this film will not encourage people to learn more about South Africa but instead people will believe they know about South Africa from seeing this movie DESPITE THE PRESENCE OF A GIANT SPACE SHIP HOVERING OVER JOHANNESBURG.

In short, your review seems to equate "District 9" with films like "The Peacemaker" or "Iron Eagle." I think if you watch those films and then you watch "District 9" there will be an obvious difference between caricature and character. "District 9" is unequivocally populated with the latter and not the former.

That seems like more evidence of my indictment of the film as "parasitic" rather than "ameliorative" science fiction. There's lots of room in Hollywood for entertaining schlock that makes no effort to engage in amelioration: I am an unrepentant fan of explosions and witty writing with no purpose. It's only a problem when we start transforming Important Issues into more grist for our entertaining schlock mill.