The aliens decided to come to a stop over South Africa, which already has a history of intolerance on par with that of the US before its civil rights movements. The film cleverly defused the "first contact" glitz by making it so that the aliens had to depend on humans for survival. In a militarized slum, we see echoes of concentration camps, Warsaw ghettos, and recent disaster relief efforts.
Aliens quickly become second class citizens, addicts to high cholesterol puréed meat products and scarcely capable of producing in our world economy. Much intolerance brews. A desk worker who has a job essentially keeping aliens down has to interact directly with them. A moral is learned through this man later in the film. I've spoiled enough there.
One of the key trends in popular media lately seems to be demonizing corporations. District 9 did not disappoint those looking for such a trend. MNU (the company for which the aforementioned character works) has programs in alien weapons research. It is here that we see the only example of real percieved value in this great extraterrestrial contact.
What I'm getting at is that I think D9 really underlined what our human nature can be at its worst. Here is an example of something that doesn't even come from our planet, and we took the opportunity to chain down the potential new alpha species, and try to get their bigger, pointy-er sticks. We took non-humans, made them sub-human, and despite having accomplished the feat of intergalactic travel (as a species,) all we wanted to do was get their weapons to work for us. Is this what really motivates us humans? Dominance? Greed? History seems to say yes.
On a side note, exactly what kind of ship was this? I like to think that this giant ship was some sort of scout ship, one of many the aliens sent through the galaxy. Maybe even a a colonization ship, which would've put just as much desire for domination on their egos. Interesting to ponder, that's for true.
SPOILER WARNING!!! This post contains some spoilers.
-The0
To answer your question about the ship, according to D9's director Neil Blomkamp in this interview:
ReplyDeleteI think that they do have a home planet, it's pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they'll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there's much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.