Last night I watched the movie District 9 (D9) and I was positively happy to have invested my time in watching the movie. It deals with quite a lot of issues about human kind, its so called humanity and the plights of so called aliens. In one form or another it shows the fight that exists between one so called well to do community and another. When the story is applied in another context we  see the same behavior repeated across various factions of the world and society in general.

Let me give you a brief of the story. An alien aircraft appears on top of Johannesberg in Africa one day. People are awed and expect things with light, sound, etc. to happen. But nothing happens, so humans force their way into the ship to find a huge number (a million something) of starving, disoriented aliens. They are given shelter in an area known as District 9. The story goes from here to tell how humans were afraid of them, how some lawless aliens created problems with establishing proper relations with humans, etc. After about 20 years, a huge relocation event is planned for the aliens to move from District 9 to District 10. And everything else happens during this phase in the story. To cut short, humans who don’t know those aliens (prawns) are intimidated, terrified or consider them plain stupid and treat them like an animal.

Everybody forgets that they were a higher form of intelligence who could space travel in such large numbers as well as have advanced weaponary.  Some of the other humans ofcourse were playing on these poor creatures by selling them catfood and getting their weapons in return. But doesn’t all these just show how fickle humanity is? Time and again we have noticed it with the greeks, romans, muslims, hitler, etc. All of these at one point of time or another treated the other kind as the humans treat aliens in the movie. Humanity is just a good excuse for a chosen few to enslave and abuse others. I really felt pretty attached to the aliens/prawns after watching the movie. As well as looking at the very real face of humanity and human kind was terrifying. Makes you feel that humanity is a farce and human beings are just another species of animals without any intelligence whatsover.

It is one thing to do so against another species and it is horrific to do so against your own kind. Think about the holocaust, crusades, inquistions, etc. and it really is disappointing to see such horrors transpired on human kind by a select few individuals to satisfy the lust for power/sex for a select few individuals. Spewing venom against people who are of a different kind, different color, different race, different religion, different culture, etc. is just not human. But I see it happening even now. People in US for example are in this economic times afraid that their jobs will be taken away from them. You can find a whole lot of URLs which point to their fear. They want the H1B’s canceled and only Americans employed in America.

Well well, just musing on humanity anyways… But all in all, it is a very good movie and I am looking forward to its second part which I guess will be produced since one of the prawns went back and promised to come back in 3 years to rescue our hero and change him back to human! Didn’t I tell you that the person who is trying to evacuate district 9 accidentally spills a chemical fuel that starts the process of mutating him into the same alien race whom he was trying to evacuate? Anyways, now you know most of the story. Go ahead and watch it. You would not regret :).