District 9: A Stranded Mothership Over Johannesburg as Apartheid Allegory

District 9 opens by inverting the invasion formula: a mothership arrives in 1982 and simply stalls over Johannesburg, going nowhere. Its passengers are not conquerors but a malnourished, leaderless refugee species, herded by the South African government into a slum called District 9. The main story unfolds 28 years later — nearly three decades on, around 2010 — by which point the "temporary" camp has festered into a militarized ghetto.^[1] Shot as a mockumentary that weaves interviews, surveillance footage and news bulletins, the film strips the UFO of its spectacle and reframes it as a social problem left rotting in plain sight. The vast, motionless craft overhead does nothing at all — and that inertia is the point: it becomes the enormous question the whole city refuses to look at.