I felt that I could connect to this movie not from a racial minority standpoint, but from an immigrant/refugee standpoint. The aliens were definitely intelligent, as evidenced in their technology, but when they are displaced from their own planet the shock of being thrown into a completely different culture changes them. They suddenly become animal-like and simple-minded. They become exploited by the native populace and become addicted to drugs(cat food), Its a tragic, but very real story presented in a different way. We(Americans) usually only see the racism issues in it because most of us don’t have that kind of experience in our history, or because they have blended together in our minds.

Why is it so hard to believe a superior alien race could end up living in the slums on Earth? The five-star general from a wealthy family in his own country becomes a dishwasher in a cheap restaurant in ours.

Meanwhile, robot suits and spaceships and aliens and gore, whoohoo!

1 – The humans in this story are stupidly evil if only to enhance the likability of an alien race that Peter Jackson deliberately made hideous to make us question our own reactions to them. Daddy Prawn is a struggling single dad trying to give his son a better life and the big mean humans want to… eat them? What the fuck? When did we all become Gargamel?!

2 – The blatant political commentary against Apartheid, something that hasn’t existed in Africa since 1996. I get that there are still horrible things happening in Africa, but Peter seems to believe that gratuitous violence and a cliched “white guy learns to identify with the oppressed non-whites” is what will fix it. Apartheid ended because basic humanity won over basic inhumanity, and Peter missed that point entirely just so he could have a big mech run around blowing up people’s heads.

3- This movie is one of Peter’s early-years ideas with a post-Return of the King budget. I’m talking about Braindead/Dead Alive, Meet the Feebles, and Bad Taste. It’s disgusting and disturbing on a level that’s just surreal, with the aforementioned political commentary wedged up its backside so people (no offense, Spoony) will be duped into thinking it’s thought-provoking, when really it’s just something for misanthropic cynics and Jhonen Vasquez fans to jack off to in-between looking up pictures of dead bodies online.

1 – The humans in this story are stupidly evil if only to enhance the likability of an alien race that Peter Jackson deliberately made hideous to make us question our own reactions to them. Daddy Prawn is a struggling single dad trying to give his son a better life and the big mean humans want to… eat them? What the fuck? When did we all become Gargamel?!

2 – The blatant political commentary against Apartheid, something that hasn’t existed in Africa since 1996. I get that there are still horrible things happening in Africa, but Peter seems to believe that gratuitous violence and a cliched “white guy learns to identify with the oppressed non-whites” is what will fix it. Apartheid ended because basic humanity won over basic inhumanity, and Peter missed that point entirely just so he could have a big mech run around blowing up people’s heads.

3- This movie is one of Peter’s early-years ideas with a post-Return of the King budget. I’m talking about Braindead/Dead Alive, Meet the Feebles, and Bad Taste. It’s disgusting and disturbing on a level that’s just surreal, with the aforementioned political commentary wedged up its backside so people (no offense, Spoony) will be duped into thinking it’s thought-provoking, when really it’s just something for misanthropic cynics and Jhonen Vasquez fans to jack off to in-between looking up pictures of dead bodies online.

There’s lots of background information on this movie, actually. For instance, the reason that the aliens are all in this slum is because when it was discovered that other than possessing these awesomely destructive weapons that were conveniently unusable by humans, being super-strong was all they really had going and as such MNU keeps them for mining work. The average human doesn’t know that so it doesn’t really crop up. Maybe it would have filled in some little holes to mention it in-movie, though.

The Nigerians being portrayed that way is a parody of the stereotypes surrounding them. As one South African TV Tropes user put it, “We know our failings.” I think that maybe a lot of the subtler (or not-so-subtle?) bits of this film were lost on a foreign audience.

By the way: if you find it hard to believe that there is still that kind of racism and xenophobia going on there, I’ll say this.
The slum that they filmed the aliens living in?
It’s a real slum.
It had just been cleared out at the time by the government, who were forcing the people who had lives there to move to a place they found more convenient.