BellaOnline Forums Travel and Culture African Culture "District 9" Angers Nigerian Community

The science fiction movie "District 9" has angered some Nigerians. The movie depicts Nigerians as gangsters, corrupt, eating aliens, and even talking about having sex with aliens.

The scenes involving Nigerians is only about 10 minutes out of the 113 minute movie. However, Nigeria is refusing to show the movie unless Sony apologizes and edits out any reference to Nigerians and Nigeria.

Unfortunately Nigeria is well known for countless email scams and a few bad eggs have given the country a bad name.

What do you think? Do Nigerians "deserve" to be depicted in a negative light, are people over reacting, or should Sony "clean up" the movie for the Nigerian audience?

ACK! This is one of the movies on my list to go review! (Actually, as soon as I get a free moment without a child with the flu, as long as it is still in the theatre it is the next one I was planning to see).

Now I'm scared to review it.

Go ahead and see it. Let us know if this thing has been hyped up.I want to see it now that I know it is supposedly set in South Africa.

There has been a lot of disappointment overall with this movie. Dan wrote a quick review and there are interesting comments: District 9 review on RunPee

With all that said, I decided against seeing the film. Grim ain't fun for me. Life is grim enough. :-P

Yeah, I think it is wrong to single out a certain community in a fictional movie that way. I haven't seen the movie, but feel that writing that type of slander into a production is unnecessary. I felt from the previews that the whole movie was kind of a negative moral view of how humans treat outsiders. Probably something that could be a classic satire if done well, but not if they call out one nationality.

I would not want to see it. I feel bad for any peoples who are portrayed in a negative or derogatory manner. But - this is what the movie industry does. Movies that show content like that are more watched than the old classic movies about family and romance. Native Americans have been portrayed negatively and without any respect for many years and it gave the people a bad reputation. It has taken a long time for Native Americans to overcome the bad rep Hollywood gave them and they still suffer from it. Movies about the good in cultures just do not make money for the industry.

I understand that movies are fiction and sci-fi movies especially should be taken as completely fake. However, movies also do have incredible power to influence how people think about a group of people. For example I'm sure a lot of people who saw "Witness" had emotions about the Amish afterward which were influenced by the movie characters. I suppose it's just human nature.

So especially if it's a group that's already being maligned, like the Nigerians, to have them cast in a really unhealthy way in a movie just reinforces that stereotype. It's like having movies centering on drunk Irish people. If you keep seeing movies like that, it has to affect the way you think about Irish people.

If you kept seeing news footage of an actor making racist comments, it would cause you to think poorly about that actor, even if they were taken out of context and most of the time he was helping minorities. It is all about what is reinforced in your brain.