Sharlto Copley in TriStar Pictures' sci-fi thriller "District 9" (Courtesy of TriStar Pictures)

A few minutes ago, TechStuff’s Jonathan Strickland asked me whether I enjoyed “District 9.” I told him “enjoy” wasn’t really the right word, mostly because the movie’s more grotesque moments really, really bothered me. But I’ve been puzzling over the film for more than a week now, and that says something.

(This way spoilers lie.)

Some of my pondering had to do with crucial parts of the plot. (There’s a trailer at the bottom of this post if you’re in the dark about what’s going on.) My first big question was: How do a million aliens armed with insanely powerful space weapons, including a mechanized battle suit that can catch bullets, allow themselves to be corralled into a ghetto? The film’s own rules might actually answer that one — the surviving aliens are their species’ working caste, and the right DNA is required to operate the weapons. So, I don’t think the movie ever explicitly said so, but it’s possible that the workers just had the wrong genes. To use their incredible weaponry, they’d have to physically change.

The whole idea of physical transformations and inter-species distinctions led me to a whole different conclusion about “District 9.” From the outset, I’d thought of it in terms of South African apartheid — those parallels are obvious, and apartheid has been a common theme in reviews and blog posts. From there, it’s also easy to think about the film in the context of slavery and the Holocaust. But, after a while, I found myself particularly drawn to Wikus Van De Merwe and his similarities to Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa — not just because both characters find themselves transformed into giant vermin.  They’re also both alienated from their families and their species and eventually abandoned entirely. Before their transformations, Gregor and Wikus are trapped in their jobs through duty and circumstance, and both men are more human after becoming something the rest of humanity finds repugnant. Wikus felt far more human to me in the film’s final moments than he did in his earliest scenes in the office and in the field.

On another note … I don’t know the answer to my second biggest question: Why wasn’t Wikus immediately quarantined after being sprayed in the face with an unknown alien liquid? I still haven’t figured out the answer to that one — so if you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Oh noes, my video broke! I put in a new one.

More on the story behind the story:
Revisiting “District 9″: What Would bees Do?
Assignment Discovery: Apartheid in South Africa
Great Books: Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Gregor Samsa Awakes