SUMMARY
In 1982, the mothership of an alien species parks over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, filled with “Prawns” who have come to earth seeking refuge. 28 years later, the initial treatment the prawns were given has changed from a refugee camp to a militarized slum named District 9. Wikus van der Merwe is given the task of leading the eviction of the Prawns and relocating them to a new concentration camp-like setting. While trying to evict the refugee species, he is accidentally exposed to an alien substance, later found to be fuel of the mothership. As Wikus obtains an infection from the substance, he begins to turn into a prawn himself, moving against the Multi-National United organization that he originally worked for. Through the story, Wikus loses all he’s ever known, and is focused on restoring things to how they once were, and begins helping two prawns that possibly have a way of fixing things.
BACKGROUND
To understand the full story of District 9, we need to understand the underlying issues of the setting. Why South Africa? South Africa has a long history of segregation and isolation from the apartheid regime, which started before World War II, and eventually ended in the early 90’s. During that time racial groups were assigned to different legal status, which eventually impacted where you could live, go to school, or work. Political rights were also limited for black South Africans, who were not allowed to vote despite their democratic majority. As the film depicted, areas that the government forced people to move quickly became the slums, with poverty and crime rates. The idea of segregating a foreign entity is one that South Africans knows very well. It is a language later viewed as the known vs the unknown and the fear between them.
UNDERLYING THEMES
The idea of segregation and isolation are large themes in the film. Things like foreign ideas, technology, and language are also used. As well as social themes like conspiracy and an evil government/organization. The film takes place in the slums of a large, upper class city in South Africa. District 9 is a militarized ghetto that is infested with crime, but is controlled by humans. The story introduces humans as a type of good, something that was willing to help the refugee aliens. As the story progresses, we see the selfish reasons human governments and organizations have tried helping the prawns. While following the main character Wikus, we’re able to draw the line between the good and evil characters that control District 9, and creates a type of shame for ever rooting for the wrong characters.
ARCHITECTURE
By looking at the ties that the “Prawns” have we can start to draw conclusions of the things we see in the film. By looking at what the aliens have come from and what they are 28 years later, we’re able to see two very different languages of settings. The first is a ghetto, run down and filled with garbage. It’s a slum living as an addition to the city that lived before it. It is poorly cared for and filled with crime and poverty. The other language is the one the aliens had before they came to earth. The alien technology certainly proves that they weren’t always “Prawns”, but a species capable of much more. The weapons and technology the film shows, indicates that the mothership was programmed to land on earth, in hopes of finding salvation for those still alive on it. The idea that a species would have a plan to begin to salvage life onto another planet is something that our species has thought about but is not even close to becoming a reality. The two languages the film depicts are two vastly different ones. The first being mass segregation, and the second being leaving earth as a species. The first is something that we’ve lived but never could have imagined, and the second is one that we want to live but can only imagine.
Beyond the language of known vs unknown that the film begins to depict, the alien technology itself has an architectural sense to it. The prawns are a civilization so advanced, they had a backup plan to arrive at earth in hopes of keeping their civilization alive. The idea of a futuristic civilizations, with weapons, vehicles, and elements that we have never seen before is something we can only imagine. The mothership of the prawns is a prime example of the language of the unknown. In 1982, when the ship first came to earth, nobody had seen anything like it before. It’s a massive, solid structure that is suspended above the ground and actually never comes in contact with earth. It's a brutalist structure in the sense of opaqueness and suspense. Like brutalist architecture, the mothership is not easily deciphered at first glance. The overlapping of solid shapes create a language that is hard to read. Between the mothership and the other alien technology we’re able to see, you can draw the conclusion that the main idea of the architecture in the film was to be unreadable, or at least a challenge to decipher. When we are first introduced to the prawns, they are painted as a frightening stranger. The brutalist architecture only adds to that fright. Through the architecture in the film, a fear of the unknown becomes present. We’re not able to see the truth behind that fear until our main character, Wikus, knows it himself.
Zachary Engelman
September 28th, 2020
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