District 9 opens Friday as the most political film of the year—if you’re a good Leftist film critic looking for an antidote to the military portrayals in Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe. The good news is that District 9 would be a perfectly apolitical film if it had shown up on Netflix as another direct-to-video actioner shot in South Africa. The plot is certainly simple (and derivative) enough. There are a bunch of aliens from outer space who weren’t quite advanced enough to keep their spaceship from running out of gas over Johannesburg. That happened 20 years ago. Now the extraterrestrial Prawns are kept in South African detention camps while their useless spaceship continues to hover above the city.

That’s your first clue that District 9 is too dopey to take seriously as a political parable. There’s only one decent comparison to a domineering government sectioning off a specific group that could make great contributions to our understanding of the world. District 9 is a cartoon where no country on Earth is really interested in dealing with an advanced race. The aliens are simply too yucky and unclean. Nobody’s even curious to see if there’s a potential Einstein amongst the Prawns.

See, I brought up a Jewish person. That’s my Nazi angle. Leftist critics will go with victims of apartheid or Palestinians. Dwelling on that apartheid angle seems particularly sad—despite a marketing campaign built on discrimination against aliens. A film overly concerned about apartheid probably wouldn’t include a Nigerian character who’s eager to eat an alien. (Really lazy critics will carp about the horrific way that the South African officials inflict Earthling names upon the alien visitors. All that accomplishes is bringing up yet another obvious comparison to Alien Nation.)

Besides, none of those parables (including mine) hold up. District 9 is like 28 Weeks Later, in that the film reveals—despite itself—that keeping the Prawns in camps is a pretty good idea. Also, the script’s lame corporate villains never represent anything as simple as a right-wing boogeyman. That might require characterization.

District 9 is still enjoyable as a smart telling of a dumb action film. Just don’t get put off by critics who are eager to let out some political rants at the end of the summer film season. At least the critics will be right about one snide comparison to G.I. Joe. The special effects in District 9 look a lot better at a fraction of the budget.

 

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