District 9 is a movie I've been looking forward to ever since I heard about it. I finally got the chance to see it about a week ago when I was home visiting Texas before school starts again in Santa Barbara. Most people I talked to didn't think much of the movie, other than it was an alien shoot-em-up movie with a lot of exploding human corpses and barbarously disgusting (to a degree, they have a point).

However, what really intrigued me about the movie was the story it told. It is the story of an alien race, who are stranded from their home planet and out of fuel preventing their return. They request to stay on Earth in the meantime and become the guinea pigs of hideous experiments ran by a multi-billion dollar corporation contracted by the governments of the world to harness their power and technology. The human governments treat the aliens like absolute trash. They are housed in a refugee camp called District 9.

What I liked about the movie was its twist on the typical alien genre. Typically you have the aliens arriving at earth and destroying the entire planet, attempting to systematically wipe out the human race. Then there is a counter-insurgence and the humans achieve victory at the last possible moment and this usually happens as the result of an inspiring speech to a meager remnant of volunteer civilians. (Don't forget you can't have a good alien movie without Will Smith.) But District 9 takes this archetype and turns in over on itself, the hierarchy of aliens dominating humans reverses and it is now we, the humans, who are the oppressors.

After spending a little more than a month this summer in Israel/Palestine, the story within District 9 sparked particular interest in me. How is it that two peoples can come to such a deeply founded level of hatred for each other? Is there any hope of reconciliation? Can there be peace? Or will the cycle synthesize itself in violent bloodshed as thought by thinkers such as Hegel and Marx?

One reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes said (I paraphrase), If it takes an alien-bug movie to talk about social issues in our world today then that's okay.

I won't give too much of the story away, I think you should go see it for yourself if you haven't already. I encourage you to look beyond the obvious and find the story that is oftentimes hidden underneath; for it is that story that is really the event of reality.