This may contain spoilers for those who have not seen the movie District 9 and wish to see it.
Many years ago I was leading a small group at a youth retreat. One youth asked me, in all seriousness, with the most sincere curiosity, “Did God create the aliens?” I said yes. If there are aliens, God created them.
Years later, I shared this question with a professor at Westminster. I then asked him what would be the Christian reaction to the existence aliens? Because it seems like to many in Christian circles that the presence of aliens would somehow ruin their theology, and they would say aliens are actually manifestations of Satan. But my professor responded differently: “I would share the Gospel with [the aliens].” Initially I was amused by the answer. I soon realized the seriousness of his reply.
That small conversation came to mind when watching District 9.
District 9 has got to be one of the best movies I have seen in years. It’s a movie that I would distinguish as a “film.” It’s not just a movie to entertain, but one with such a depth to penetrate one’s conscience and raise questions about one’s self and society. It’s not every day you see a violent, gory Sci-Fi movie that can have such an effect. I used to think Avatar had that kind of quality, but District 9 takes it to a whole new level.
Movies such as this, I believe, have a Gospel message in it. Though it may be imperfect, as there is no perfect analogy to what Christ did and does, it still shows various dimensions of that message. For District 9, I felt it had to have had a very significant message within it for it to have the kind of effect it had on me. But without having watched it a second time, going solely on my initial reaction and memory, I could not figure it out.
The main alien did have some Christ-likeness to him. He was far more intelligent than the others, but he lived among them and cared for them. He wanted to save them and bring them home. But the comparison was not strong enough for me. There had to be something more.
The human reaction to the aliens initially did show glimpses of the Gospel message in helping the poor, feeding the hungry, etc. The aliens were discovered malnourished and on the verge of death. The humans did the humane thing to those that were not human. But as the story goes, that was a short term response. It soon turned into oppression, segregation, etc.
The main character has something of an incarnational analogy to him. He slowly became more and more like the aliens, and eventually experienced what they experience. He walked like them, talked like them, ate like them, and was persecuted like them. But to what redeemable end was that? It didn’t have the connection I hoped to see.
I began to realize this movie’s Gospel message is not in the film itself. Rather, it was in my reaction to the movie.
The aliens, when introduced in the beginning, were disgusting looking creatures. They were called “prawns” due to their similarities to the prawn. They were difficult to look at. However, what ends up happening toward the end of the movie is that you begin to not notice their appearance, you begin to empathize with their suffering, you hate the evil that has been put upon them, and you want them to be saved. Such a transformation in one’s outlook is what the Gospel does.
Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus comes to mind. The rich man saw Lazarus all the time. He even knew his name. He saw him by the gate. The gate was transparent in the sense that you could see through it, but it kept the people outside. District 9 was a slum. People knew who were inside, they knew what was going on, but they avoided them. The slum had a gate that kept the aliens from leaving. The Gospel would have transformed the rich man to help Lazarus. The rich man would have been a neighbor, like the Good Samaritan, to Lazarus. But he didn’t. In the same way, people did not respond to the atrocities going on in District 9.
It’s appropriate that this movie takes place in Johannesburg. A place where racism was well known and the experience of apartheid is in their not-so-distant past. What happened to the black man in South Africa was now happening to the alien. The derogatory words that have been made for human ethnic groups, were now made against these aliens. Somehow this movie makes a conversion happen to the viewer (at least to me) that they’d want a response against these atrocities against the aliens.
The humans in the movie were never really converted. If anything, only the main character who gradually lost his humanity (physically) was converted to some extent. The viewer, however, could very well have been converted.
That is the Gospel message in this movie. It is the message that speaks to our conscience that this is not right, that we should fight for the oppressed and free them. It is a message that has us love our neighbor. Love others as God’s creation, no matter how hideous they may be on the outside. It is a message that makes the feelings of others very real, and we love them as we ourselves want to be loved.
Certainly, when talking about the Gospel, the issue of Sin and Grace must be discussed. But like I said before, no movie can make a perfect analogy to the work of Christ. Yet, the movie still deals with the issue of sin. The Gospel does not only deal with the sins of self, but the sins of society. The latter is what is dealt with here.
So, what should we do if we encounter aliens? Share the Gospel with them.
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