District 9 has received much attention since it's release last year, and for many good reasons. It's the directorial debut of South African filmmaker Niell Blomkamp, and has been nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Visual Effects. However, it has also received attention for it's political message involving the treatment of ethnic minorities.
The story revolves around a spaceship that has stranded itself in sky over Johannesburg, and the alien race, derogatorily referred to as prawns, that have come to live in the slums of the city. The film follows Wikus van de Merwe, played by Sharlto Copley, as he does his job at MultiNational United and attempts to get the prawns to consent to forced evictions out of District 9 and Johannesburg.
And the treatment of the prawns at the hands of MNU is not kind, but it is not unheard of in human history. First, of course, are the evictions. Military forces, dragging aliens, adult and children alike, out of shacks at gunpoint is reminiscent of Palestinians being forced off of their land in 1948. Prawns have medical experiments performed on them, like Jewish people in Nazi Germany, including one called the Pain Tolerance Exam, which involves a power drill. When prawns are suspected of crime, they are tortured for information, not read their Miranda Rights.
Blomkamp challenges your notions about these types of movies. It is hard not to feel angry for the prawns when they are beaten or killed, but when they lash out and kill a man with one swipe it is understandable why the humans react with fear. Blomkamp does a great job forcing us to feel sympathy for the aliens. It is obvious how intelligent they are, but they also have a different moral code, so different, in fact, that to an outsider it may seem as if they have none at all. In this way, he uses the aliens as a stand-in for some native people that colonial powers might have met hundreds of years ago, maybe in South Africa.
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