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Neill Blomkamp's 2009 science fiction blockbuster captivated audiences around the world, garnering four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. While genres like horror, science fiction and action are undeniably popular with viewers, these sorts of films are rarely considered 'serious' enough for Oscar consideration. So what made District 9 - a film about aliens and spaceships - so different? Its spectacular effects and familiar science fiction story about an extraterrestrial invasion make it pleasurable to watch, but by focusing on humanity's xenophobic treatment of the aliens in contemporary Johannesburg, District 9 also functions as a powerful allegory for the very real traumas that faced South Africa, the film's country of production, during and after apartheid. Even the title District 9 evokes associations with South Africa's segregated past: District Six was an area outside of Cape Town that the government declared 'white only' in the 1960s, forcing the removal of over 60,000 non-white residents from their homes. By employing elements of documentary filmmaking to tell its tale, District 9 acknowledges from within its own diegesis that the boundaries between fiction and the real can be powerfully and meaningfully blurred.
District 9 is not the only film that employs the structures and iconographies of a particular genre to make a political statement. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) is a zombie movie that makes a powerful comment on the North American civil rights movement that rocked the country during the 1960s and 1970s. Many science fiction films of the 1950s - including The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) - are broadly understood as allegorical responses to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare that marked this period. Science-fiction-as-allegory was also certainly not restricted to the United States; the famous Japanese monster film Godzilla (Gojira, Ishirô Honda, 1954) is almost impossible to watch without thinking of Japan's involvement in World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima. District 9 clearly earns a place in this history of the politically minded science fiction film, but it also adopts elements from other genres and categories including horror, 1980s action movies...