From Brooklyn gangsters to South African prawns. District 9, film number four in my top-five countdown, is a science-fiction thriller that uses extra-terrestrial visitors – known colloquially in the film as ‘prawns’ – to deliver a potent statement about some of history’s injustices and outrages, including apartheid-era South Africa. Its title alludes to the real-life District Six, a Cape Town neighbourhood from which 60,000 inhabitants were forcibly removed during the 1970s.
The hero of the film, Wikus van de Merwe, is a comical yet admirable government agent who is forced to serve eviction notices on the prawns of District 9, a government camp in Johannesburg. During the evictions he begins to see things from the prawns’ point of view but ends-up paying a hideous price.
It might all sound a bit weird – and it is. It’s also a magnificently challenging film. It is at once ludicrous, thought-provoking, compelling and heart-breaking. You laugh with it and at it, before it fills you with a sense of heartache and injustice. Personally, I cannot watch the ending without welling-up.
One reviewer got to the heart of film’s extraordinary power: “Substitute ‘black,’ ‘Asian,’ ‘Mexican,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘Jew,’ or any number of different labels for the word ‘prawn’ in this film and you will hear the hidden truth behind the dialogue”. There are Shoah parallels in District 9, including the camp’s signposts that forbid the prawns from sitting in particular places, or engaging in certain activities.
Here is the trailer. I’ll continue the top five countdown next Friday.
I have to say that I really did not like District 9. Not because the message was not apparent, nor important, but simply because the film was boring, plodding and quite frankly annoying. Sorry…
It’s Friday, so it must be Chas’s favourite films countdown, and this week I’d like to nominate another important film in my life, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.
The Magnificent Seven was based on this and in my opinion, was a lesser copy. Seven Samurai was a powerful depiction of the out of work Samurai soldiers, hired by peasants to defend them from bandits. It’s easy to see how the actors in the Magnificent Seven, styled themselves on the characters in the Japanese film.
The style and skill of the samurai warriors really impressed me and obviously the director of the later, US copy.
Highly recommended again.
Thanks again for counting down with me. Again, I’m now interested to watch your recommendation.
Again, it’s Friday so it’s time again for Chas’s favourite films and this week, I nominate North by Northwest. This is an action thriller starring Cary Grant and it absolutely oozes style as I recently noticed.
I remember seeing this as an adolescent and the images that were most powerful were those shots taken in a wheatfield where he is buzzed by a crop dusting plane – very nail biting stuff, and then again at Mount Rushmore, when he is involved in a fight with a baddie – Martin Landau I think, while teetering on the edge of a several hundred foot drop.
The pace of the film is maintained all the way through – really exciting stuff and it provided real suspense and thrills especially for one so young.
I saw it again recently and it was then that I picked up on Grant and his co stars, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason and how stylish they were – another Hitchcock classic of course. Again, highly recommended.