Reply to District 9 review

It seems that my friend Leopard was unable to post his reply to my review in the comments section because it was longer than the default 4,096 characters. He sent it to me via email and I took his permission to share it here.

Here is the full comment of my friend:

Hey, I tried to leave a comment, but couldn't. My comment is too long for the blog. Please read it, it is important, I left a small comment on the blog.
So here is it:

 Unfortunately, I couldn't disagree more with this review, it seems to me that either you intentionally search for shortcomings in the movie, or, more likely, you just didn't get it.

 The movie starts with a documentary style, we all agreed we liked. What you failed to understand is that the documentary was not about the alien invasion, it was about Wikus van de Merwe. The invasion took place like 20 years ago "1982" and the documentary filmed today was about Wikus and how he turned bad. You get the feeling everybody knew already about the invasion, the movie was just refreshing our memories, there was no need, at least for me, to know more. If you are making a documentary today about say the Palestinian refugee camp youth, you will give a quick, not necessarily comprehensive, hint about the history of the occupation, and then get to the main topic of your film, and that's what they did in here, the movie is about Wikus, district 9, and not about the invasion and its circumstances. I don't know why you assumed that no research was done regarding the alien presence, their anatomy and civilization, many of the speakers in the documentary were alien researchers, engineers etc, so I assumed they did the research, yet again this was not of relevance to the actual story, this was "common sense" for the people living those events, at that time.
 You spent two, fairly long paragraphs, enumerating the questions the movie "failed" to answer, but you never tell us with these questions answered, how will it affect the overall story?

 Which takes me to the actual story you apparently failed to see, or wasn't interested in seeing.
You see the story is about a race of "aliens" that came to this land, which happens to be South Africa, those folks look different speak different and more importantly, needed the "human" help, so "humans" fed up with their actions and needs, feeling "superior" to the other race decided to put them in a "District 9" and nobody really cares about them, lets just dump them somewhere else and get on with out lives. The way we see these "aliens" is as savage, ignorant, unable to think or plan, incapable of experiencing emotions.
Now, read the previous paragraph again and change: Aliens into Black, Humans into White, and District 9 into District 6. You will get the true story this film is trying to parody.
This also explains why most of the folks working at MNU where white, and the only black one, was a trainee, they all treated badly and was eager to "serve".


 Regarding the Nigerian gang thing, from the movie you get two things: One, "MNU" supports the gang leaders as part of their evil balance of powers in the district. Two, gang leader "Obesandjo" is bad.
 Now, again, I will ask you to replace "MNU" with South African regimen, led by president "Mbeki", and replace "Obesandjo" with "Obasanjo" former president of Nigeria. You see recently, Nigerian elections, saw "Obasanjo" placing his hand-picked successor "Yar' Adua" into the Presidential palace. The elections were mired in controversy. The ballot papers for the election, were printed in South Africa, and though a lot of international concerns about the elections were sounded, Mbeki was the first to congratulate the new Nigerian president, get the point. Naturally the the Nigerian government was deeply offended by the film. And it was later banned in Nigeria.


This story is not about some alien invasion or independence day, this is about something else, this is a re-imagination of the District 6 forced removal of 60,000 people during the apartheid regimen, this is a cry for help for every refugee camp and  minority concentration camps all over the world today, they are humans too, they have children too, they can feel too, and they deserve to live as much as we do.

My only take on the movie however, is that the land belonged to the black people in real life, they weren't just invaders, and they had nowhere else to go.

This movie deserves more than 7/10, at least that's what I think.

N.B. I haven't replied to this yet. When I find time, I will reply here. Watch this space.