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Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 sci-fi action film District 9 is a standout in the genre. The movie centers around a government bureaucrat tasked with relocating malnourished, refugee aliens in Johannesburg, South Africa, who must partner with an extraterrestrial to survive when he accidentally mutates into one of the prawns. The film was a commercial hit with a $211 million box office gross and also a critical darling, scoring a “Certified Fresh” 90% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and earning four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Unfortunately, Netflix subscribers only have a week left to stream it, as the movie is scheduled to exit the platform on April 1st.
What Makes District 9 So Great?
District 9 is considered a sci-fi modern classic for a lot of reasons, perhaps most importantly for the way in which it recontextualized classic genre tropes into a biting allegory for modern social issues. The movie flipped the script on the typical alien invasion trope to examine human cruelty. The typical humanity-fights-back narrative was turned on its head with a story where the aliens are refugees and used as a powerful allegory for apartheid, xenophobia, and social segregation. That was driven home through District 9’s mockumentary style approach, the blend of found footage, newscasts, surveillance video, and traditional filmmaking making the movie feel disturbingly realistic and more like an urgent documentary than a piece of fiction.
