'District 9' - morality play or B-movie?

I watched the sci-fi movie "District 9" last weekend in an attempt to see as many of the movies nominated for best picture Oscars as possible before the Academy Awards in March. I knew it was out on DVD so it seemed like an easy movie to get out of the way.

When it first came out in movie theaters, "District 9" wasn't really hyped all that much. People thought it was just another sci-fi movie about aliens invading the earth. But then there was talk about how it was really a referendum on the Apartheid era in South Africa and inequality. Then it started getting nominated for awards and an Oscar nomination for a sci-fi film is rare.

The only person I know who saw it, a co-worker, said he turned the movie off in the first 10 minutes because he doesn't like fictional stories that get all high and mighty. I thought for sure I would disagree with him since I've been to South Africa and have seen the aftermath of Apartheid in person.

But about 10 minutes into the movie, I too, wanted to turn it off. Like another movie I've seen recently, "The Book of Eli," "District 9" also has a bit of a split personality. It starts out a bit like a mockumentary, with talking head interviews of people who knew Vikus Van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), though viewers don't know yet what has happened to Vikus.

The crux of the movie is that an alien spaceship has landed on earth, right in the middle of South Africa's capital Johannesburg. And it's just hovering there and not moving, so a team goes in and "rescues" the beings on the ship. These beings don't appear to be the intelligent creatures one would expect to invade the earth. They look like giant craw fish, are addicted to cat food and are generally unpleasant.

The aliens don't look nearly as cool as the ones in more high-tech movies, like "Avatar." And there is a bit of splatter blood giving the movie a low-budget feel.

The government huddles the aliens all in District 9, a sort of makeshift township that is outside the city limits. But 20 years later, the alien population has grown and they are venturing into town more often. The government hires a contractor to come in and move the aliens further from town - into a District 10.

Now for anyone who doesn't know about Apartheid, during that era the white conservative minority had control of the government - they decided who could live where, who could do what jobs, what language people could speak and how much education they could have. The color of one's skin determined the level of privilege a person had - and members of the same family could even be classified as different races based on skin color. In the 1970s, 60,000 people were removed forcibly from District 6 in Cape Town, most of them Cape Malay (or Muslim immigrants).

So it's pretty obvious where writer/director Neill Blomkamp was going with his movie.

Unfortunately for me, the story gets lost up in the action film and the conspiracy theories. Van de Merwe is a pawn of his corporation, which really wants the high tech weaponry that the aliens have - humans cant' use it because it requires the alien DNA to make it work. In his efforts to uncover alien weapons, and force the aliens out, Van de Merwe accidentally infects himself with some ink-like stuff that starts transforming him into an alien.

You'd think pretty quickly, he would start to be compassionate to the aliens, given he starts growing a prawn arm of his own. But it takes a really long time, and a lot of shoot outs before, Van de Merwe finally comes to the big conclusion that human or alien, we are all so much alike.

Though the thought behind the movie was well-meaning, I don't really understand how it got nominated for best picture.

People from other countries who want to know about Apartheid would be better served by watching the 2004 film "Forgiveness," which I saw while in South Africa and which unfortunately has never been released in the United States.