I watched District 9, a sci-fi movie that utilizes the fake documentary technique, and wrote a review.

A science fiction movie utilizing the fake documentary technique

The official name of science fiction movie is Science Fiction Film, which refers to a movie with a science fiction theme. Some of the most famous science fiction movies we know are E.T., Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and The Terminator. These movies use colorful computer graphics and great imagination to create a strong impression of “this is science fiction”. However, District 9 adds a little something different to the mix and makes a bigger impression on us. It’s not that it has better computer graphics than other science fiction movies, or that it’s more imaginative. It’s the movie’s use of external techniques, namely faux documentary techniques, that make the movie come alive.

Documentary technique and faux documentary

The documentary technique literally means organizing a movie like a documentary. For example, interspersing news footage, interviews, and investigative footage, and using handheld shots during important climactic scenes. Handheld shots give the illusion of a camcorder, as if someone is actually recording it. They’re often used in horror and war movies to convey reality through shaky footage. Films that use the documentary technique are often linked to political and social issues and are often controversial and socially impactful. One of the best examples of this is Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
The faux documentary technique refers to ‘fake documentaries’. It’s a movie that borrows the format of a documentary and uses the audience’s subconscious impression that a documentary is filming factual information to make them more emotionally invested in a fiction that isn’t real. District 9 uses this technique to create the illusion that we are actually watching a documentary, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. As shown in the introduction of the movie, the use of interviews and investigative footage helps to bring the science fiction movie into our own reality.

District 9 and the effectiveness of the faux documentary technique

However, it’s not just the use of faux documentary techniques that makes this movie great. It’s the internal aspect of the movie, the message the director wants to convey to us, that makes it great. To compare how well District 9 does this, we can use Cloverfield as an example. It’s also a sci-fi movie, and it uses the faux documentary technique, so in terms of tension and reality, the two movies are similar, but I couldn’t tell from watching Cloverfield what the director was trying to convey to us. To me, it was just a movie with a monster and I couldn’t figure out anything else. In other words, the faux-documentary technique acts as a frame for the reality of the movie itself and the audience’s focus, and it’s what’s inside that frame that matters. This is evident in District 9, where the first half of the movie is told in the third person through the use of documentary techniques, and then the focus shifts to the main character, Wikus van de Merwe. The movie uses the fake documentary format to immerse the audience in the beginning, and as the story progresses, the focus shifts to the main character to tell the story.

The enemy of man is not aliens!

To give you a brief synopsis of the movie, in 1982, a giant spaceship with millions of aliens on board appeared over Cape Town, South Africa. However, the ship doesn’t make any movements, and the humans decide to explore it. The aliens soon realize that they are all sick and languishing inside the ship, and the humans decide to settle them in an area known as District 9. The aliens are originally violent and unruly creatures, but the alien leadership orders them not to harm the Earthlings who saved them, and they try to make progress with humans. However, these efforts are soon disrupted. The alien leadership is divided, human citizens are hostile, and humans are greedy for the aliens’ advanced weaponry. This eventually leads to the demise of human-alien coexistence, with the aliens living a homeless existence in shanty towns in District 9, exploited by humans, and killed for no reason at all. Humans have become the social powerhouse, and aliens, despite their advanced weaponry, have become the social underdog.
Wikus van de Merwe, the film’s protagonist, is working his way around District 9 when he is accidentally exposed to an alien liquid, which causes him to begin to alienize, starting with his right arm. This causes him to spend his time on the run from humans who want to use him medically, and he eventually realizes that he has nowhere else to go but District 9 and stays there. There, he joins forces with other aliens to fight to become human again. Along the way, he gradually begins to think from the alien’s point of view instead of the human’s, and realizes how selfish all humans, including himself, have been in the past, to the aliens and to each other. All of this is presented in a faux-documentary style, allowing us to accept these cruelties as fact and to seriously consider these issues.

The message of District 9 and our own reflection

For example, if we watch a documentary about water pollution in our country, we can properly recognize the seriousness of pollution and think about how we can improve these problems and even take action. Similarly, the fake documentary technique allows us to expand our thinking beyond the dynamism and realism of the film. We don’t just accept these problems as facts, we think about how to solve them and apply them to practice.
In a typical alien sci-fi movie, aliens are the enemy that invades Earth, and humans fight back and eventually win. This movie, on the other hand, flips the tables. The aliens are the underdogs, and humans are the ones trying to rise above them. The humans, the socially powerful, exploit, use, harass, and even kill the aliens, the socially weak. Why did the director choose to reverse this common alien trope? To understand this, we need to understand the context in which the director made the movie. A typical alien sci-fi movie is set in a big city in Europe or the United States. However, this movie is set in Johannesburg, South Africa. This is to subtly criticize the “apartheid” that took place in South Africa in the past. Apartheid refers to South Africa’s extreme racist policies and institutions. In the past, whites were so discriminatory and oppressive that they actually forced black people to live in one area and only live there. To put it simply, think of aliens in movies as real humans, not aliens. The aliens are human beings just like us on Earth, and they are the social underdogs, and the powerful are the ones who do the worst things to them. The director does a great job of showing the selfishness and cruelty of these humans through the use of the genre, Johannesburg, the setting, and the faux documentary technique.

Conclusion

Throughout human history, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression of the weak, as well as the dangerous idea that their beliefs are right, have led to many evil acts. We already know this from countless events: world wars, the tragedy of genocide, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Marutta, the Holocaust, religious wars, etc. The important thing is that we know it all the time and yet it repeats itself. The enemy of man is not aliens. The enemy is selfish humans themselves. How many times in our lives have we casually rejected something for the sake of our beliefs, or because we think our beliefs are right, and if this is the history of humanity, is it really right? I think we need to look back not only at the movie District 9, but also at the past history of humanity and seriously reflect on our current human behavior and attitudes and consider what we should think about for the future of humanity.