There was a lot of ironic chuckling by the South African audience sitting in a Hyde Park cinema. Ironic because you saw both black and white South Africans saying essentially the same thing; complaining about crime and people irritating what some felt were their 'rights'.
The verisimilitude in District 9 in incredible. The gritty backdrop of Johannesburg perfectly backdrops the gritty alien shipwreck and their dirty, ailing alien occupants.
District 9 is a powerful, riveting story, that cleverly does the Saul to Paul conversion, and we come to rather like the aliens, or is it we are revolted by the common human [or is it inhuman] lust for power.
I won't give away any more, but I do offer a scenario for District 10.
DISTRICT 10
3 years later a large alien ship returns. It appears slightly modernised, and highly weaponised. Its occupants do detailed plasma scans of Earth and discover, to their dismay, that in their absence, human beings have mastered and to some extent cloned both their technology and prawns.
As a result, there are three factions - humans [a military industrial complex], a coalition/resistance of impoverished humans and prawns and a third group, a militant group of prawns, some of them hybridised with human beings [escaped medical experiments] that has managed to fortify and protect itself using aspects of technology that people have not mastered yet. The militant prawns are mostly defensive, and to some extent collaborate with the more offensive coalition, but both groups are vastly outnumbered, but not outgunned, by the human military-industrial complex.
The visitors also note that some fundamental changes have occurred since their departure. Many large human centres are in ruins, commerce is in limbo. People seem to have emerged from a terrible period of war, pandemic disease, famine and fire. The world is a warmer, somewhat different, and suddenly very hostile place.
The city of Johannesburg looks increasingly like Beirut, or Baghdad like, with daily explosions and fire. Yet it is also a multinational gathering point for what remains of the world's powerbrokers, and there is an unholy alliance of leaders and players, with more and more survivors streaming from the radioactive wastes of the northern hemisphere.
The northern hemisphere has largely fallen into strife, with some nuclear exchanges, along with a crippling energy paralysis. South Africa has, for reasons to some extent apart, but no doubt also due to their new access to technologies, managed to avoid some of the energy predicaments that pushed other countries into failure. As a result, South Africa has become the epicentre of an energy fisticuff, with multinational militaries attempting to bargain or bully the South Africans into sharing and researching the alien technology. Armies mass on all sides, from Namibia, around the coastline, to Zimbabwe, while negotiations proceed, and deals are made under the table.
So Johnson returns to find an unholy mess hanging on a thread. Powerful human militaries have razed, in many cases, their own cities in an effort to stave off violent, uncontrollable mobs of increasingly starving, desperate and suffering people, more and more of whom come to associate themselves with the plight of the 'homeless aliens'. Increasingly they vent their anger against the state. The efforts of the state, again, centre on gaining control of both weapons and the holy grail, alien energy. Toward this end, aliens are abducted and tortured, and Wikus operates essentially as a double agent, as a counter-insurgent. But whose side is he really on?
In this new world there are a lot of people walking around, and working in the soil. Caspers and other military vehicles are more mobile, but impeded by rubble strewn, pothole filled, and car littered highways. Abandoned cars, some of which are made into makeshift shelters.
When Johnson returns, many hail the return as a solution, their salvation. But the military industrial complex, using their increased weapon knowledge, launch an immediate, and impressive offensive. It is a brazen, surprisingly collaborated attack, using elaborate weapons, and enough missiles to darken the sky. The heavenly fire simply falls and ignites the city below, in a fire that isn't fully doused even when the ship finally leaves.
The prawns have anticipated this move; their shields and defences easily anticipate and hold off what is an unexpectedly short lived attack, and earth based weapons are quickly paralysed, and further assaults neutralised by destroying a few remaining energy depots.
The first two thirds involve the complete annihilation of what remains of the human condition, with Wikus playing a role in securing his own survival, and that of his human wife, whilst refugees are loaded, under fire, onto the spaceship. Some of these refugees are human. And one of them is a man called Marthinus, a doctor.
While Marthinus plays a critical role in the strategy to speed his cohorts to safety, when the evacuation is finally complete, he elects to stay behind in what is a ruined, diseased, almost lifeless cesspool.
Johnson leaves his son with Marthinus to begin developing the Earth's resources again, using clean fusion energy, radioactive containment instruments and an array of machine robots.
Meanwhile, Wikus returns to the prawn home planet, where work begins to reverse his alien appearance...
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