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Neill Blomkamp Presents: Illegal Alien

I was intrigued to hear that Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9Elysium, and the upcoming Chappie, claims that his next picture is going to be a movie set in the Alien universe:

Um... So I think it's officially my next film. #alien

A photo posted by Brownsnout (@neillblomkamp) on

According to Variety, the new film will take place sometime after Prometheus. Very exciting! I'm interested to see how the South African director uses the universe created by Ridley Scott to examine his discomfort with immigration.

I'm surprised that District 9 hasn't come in for more criticism from the politicized set. This is, after all, a movie that has often been described as an allegory for apartheid while portraying the oppressed dwellers of segregated shanty towns as, literally, mindless animals addicted to drugs. (Well, cat food, but the effect is the same.) And it's a movie that portrayed actual black Africans as vicious gangsters and predatory witch doctors who literally believe that consuming the flesh of the prawns will allow them to take on the attributes of the alien insects. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir hinted at some of the discomfort right-thinking people should have with the portrayal:

There’s an ingredient here that will definitely push some people’s buttons. I’m talking about the way you depict these really scary Nigerian crime lords who are running things in the townships. They’re violent and brutal, they’re obsessed with voodoo and magic. You know, these images are pretty uncomfortable, especially for Americans who tend to be so careful in public discussions of race: Here’s a white guy from South Africa making a movie with scary, murderous black African villains.

Sure, I’m totally aware of that. I know those buttons are going to be pushed. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of it, and it doesn’t matter how politically correct or politically incorrect you are. The bottom line is that there are huge Nigerian crime syndicates in Johannesburg. I wanted the film to feel real, to feel grounded, and I was going to incorporate as much of contemporary South Africa as I wanted to, and that’s just how it is.

Again, what's interesting here is not just the racial aspect but the immigration aspect. There are two types of illegal aliens in District 9: actual aliens from outer space, and Nigerian interlopers who have set up shop in South Africa. The deleterious nature of illegal immigration is an idea that clearly weighs heavily on Blomkamp:

In District 9 , aliens land in Johannesburg and are forced to live in a filthy shanty town, segregated from human society. Can we get the giant apartheid metaphor out of the way first?

It isn't necessarily just a metaphor for apartheid. It's not. … What it is meant to be is a whole bunch of topics that had an effect on me when I was living there. Topics I became more interested in once I left. ... Just everything that goes on in that country - xenophobia, the collapse of Zimbabwe and the flood of illegal immigrants into South Africa, and then how you have impoverished black South Africans in conflict with the immigrants. All that amounts to a very unusual situation.

There's something similar at work in Elysium. Yes, it's populist in the one-percent-versus-the-99-percent sort of way. But it's also a movie that plays strongly to nativist sentiments, that posits the Mexifornication of America's western seaboard will be a complete and utter disaster. In Elyisum, which takes place in 2154, America's borders have fallen and crime has skyrocketed. Jobs disappeared as unskilled migrants flooded the market. Overpopulation led to economic and ecological collapse. The wealthy fled to the space station Elysium as Earth descended into chaos. Indeed, in most movies of this sort the Elysians—who live in harmony with their habitat and care for one another with complete selflessness—would be considered the heroes and the people of Earth the villains. If you take ten seconds to think about the film beyond terms of "rich bad, poor good," you can't help but wonder if those who live on Elysium are right for wanting to maintain the precious balance they've created.

I haven't seen Chappie yet, so I don't know if Blomkamp continues playing with these themes in that flick. But it seems to me that Alien is the sort of picture perfectly suited for a rumination on the importance of secure borders. After all, what is Aliens but an extended battle between space-trucker Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and one-percenter Carter (Paul Reiser) about the importance of maintaining border security? Sounds like something that would be right up Blomkamp's alley.