District 9

I saw District 9 last week. It's a very good movie. A very violent, good movie.

It's about aliens who land in South Africa. But it's really about apartheid. The humans treat the aliens with the same racist contempt that whites treat Africans. And the parallels between the apartheid history and the movie plot are many. But being about aliens you can tell the story without fear of being too honest. And you can use fantasy technology to find a different way out of the problem than is possible in real life.

It's interesting how in the movie the humans keep the aliens oppressed, even though the aliens have superior technology. But their technology is all broken down, or the humans take all their weapons away from them. Of course, this parallels the Colonial experience: so long as you have superior weaponry, you can control the natives, but there's a constant fear that they will rise up and overthrow and take control themselves.

District 9 based on a 6 minute short film with the same premise, but doesn't explore the themes in the same way. It's called "Alive in Joburg".