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District 9
I saw District 9 the other day, and it was.....odd. More below the fold if you don't mind reading some spoilers.
First things first: I basically liked the movie. It didn't rock my world or anything, and contra some critics, I didn't think it made me grapple with deep and profound issues. Still, it had a cool premise, decent execution, fast pacing, and yes, I'd definitely see the sequel.
But there was something so striking about the plot that it gnawed at me the entire time I was watching. We're told that a gigantic alien starship came to rest above Joburg 20 years ago, and ever since then a million aliens have been living in a nearby camp. The aliens understand English and we understand their twittering clicks, so language is apparently not an issue.
And yet, the events of the movie make it clear that in all that time, we've learned virtually nothing about them. What's more, nobody seems to have even tried. A bunch of aliens arrive in a 1000-acre FTL starship that breaks down over South Africa and....apparently it's all a big yawn. We just stick 'em in a camp, create a bumbling bureaucracy called MNU to keep order and send in cans of cat food, and then forget about them.
WTF? This wouldn't matter so much except that the entire plot relies on the fact that we know virtually nothing about the aliens. Maybe I'm being a little anal about this, but this apparent lack of interest (aside from the evil genetic research group, of course) was so wildly unlikely that it really made it hard to suspend disbelief. Screwing with the laws of physics is fine. Screwing with basic aspects of human nature is not so fine.
That said, I'd still pay to see Christopher return and kick a little human ass. That would be fun.
I agree. The movie was a
I agree.
The movie was a little pretentious, full of itself and preachy. The story was too slow in the beginning while simultaneously not offering enough back story to get you heavily invested in it or any of the characters.
The entire second half of the movie was far too predicable and bland. As a movie, I really didn't think it was great, and I'm guessing the initial public euphoria will wear off.
The whole apartheid allegory felt ham-fisted and cartoonish. As you mention, 20 years and no real interaction, no attempt to harness any of their technology or scientific advancements? Really? Oh, right, it's the evil white man's fault. I think they sorta/kinda try to cover this up with the fact that Christopher is the only smart alien left, and all of the others are mindless workers, but I didn't think that worked very well.
The CGI was pretty incredible, and well integrated, but it doesn't save it from a mediocre script/story.
The thing that bothers me
The thing that bothers me about these films (and TV shows) is that the aliens always look somewhat humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a face, a couple of eyes etc. I assume this was the case in this film as well.
When will a director have the courage to portray aliens as creatures that took a completely different evolutionary path?
Robert Heinlein
The aliens in Starship Troopers were giant insects of various kinds, completely un-human. Too bad that the 1997 movie was so different from the book.
Re: District 9
I thought that the humans in the movie did express interest in the aliens--particularly in their weapons technology--but were stymied by its DNA-specific tooling. I think that perhaps part of what you're meant to take away from the movie is that, however curious they are, humans may just not be mentally up to the job of comprehending these newcomers. (We're pretty obviously intended to regard with contempt the widespread human assumption that the aliens are inferior.)
aliens
I both agree and disagree. Remember, the ship arrived 20 years before the movie starts, and they tell us that the aliens still on the ship appeared to be uneducated workers. I don't know if they say how many there were, but there are 1.8 million when the movie starts, and their reproduction is strongly discouraged, so you've got to figure there were hundreds of thousands on the ship. First order of business was to get them housed and fed, so presto, you have a refugee camp, and we know what refugee camps are like. But we don't know what efforts were made to study them in those first few years, or why they were abandoned or if there are a few individual prawns in better situations elsewhere in the world.
But I do agree when it comes to the ship. I can't believe Christopher would find the ship empty when he returns to it--there would have been a garrison of scientists and military on that ship trying to learn everything they could, and they wouldn't give up on that even if they did give up on the prawns themselves.
Nice to see something other than the Alien Invasion meme
And the whole weapons integrated with DNA thing was silly. I can understand the premise, but obviously there would be a way to get around (hack) the DNA check and jut fire the freaking weapons. And what kept the spaceship hanging above the city?
The pig flying near the end of the movie was a nice touch though.
"Bureaucracy"
The MNU was a PRIVATE corporation. I thought that this was one of the main takeaways of the movie -- that private military contractors or the privatization of what should be government functions does not work. Calling them a "bureaucracy" makes it seem like it is the government, when in fact it is big business/military-industrial complex.
You missed it. The Premise
You missed it. The Premise is the UN got together and outsourced study on the aliens to MNU since they couldn't agree on what any one country should do about it. And MNU couldn't figure it out, for various reasons.
"When will a director have the courage to portray aliens as creatures that took a completely different evolutionary path?"
When money begins to grow on tress.
Exactly
Saw it. Liked it.
Main takeaways for me were (a) MNU was private (sound familiar?) and (b) that we didn't try to learn anything about them. Just stuck them away. Isn't that what we try to do with folks we see as different?
Spoilers ahoy
There were definitely some issues with the plotting, but mostly what I took away from those issues is that it's easy to overlook some pretty serious problems in a movie that is otherwise (acting, pacing, effects, concept) quite good. After all, The Dark Knight had some seriously lame elements as well.
For my money, the most wince-worth plot device of D9 was the fact that the magical rocket fuel also doubled as a magical human-to-alien-DNA-converter. That's one hell of a contrivance. But it still wasn't enough to dent my enjoyment of this movie.
The beginning of the movie and website shoulda...
Well, apparently in the history the UN did the rescuing, America (where MNU came from) tore into the big ship and interrogated the bug-people and...
...Found nothing useful. Their technology is an extension of themselves. It literally does not operate without them around; not just a dna lockout. And no one trusted them enough to let them operate it, so...
And of course no first-world country is going to let someone else mine the spaceship for goodies, and while it's parked above a major city no one wants to crash it (at least, the locals are against that) so the status quo is maintained.
It did press belief, but we didn't even know if the aliens had ftl in those twenty years. The ship was broken so far as we knew, right? The aliens were worse off and starving on the ship when we found them.
united states of joburg
How curious are anti-immigrant Americans to learn about alien families living in near secret Homeland Security prisons? How curious are any Americans to learn about what motivates aliens to cross scorching deserts to find low paying, hard work in order to feed their families?
Unless those alien immigrants came from Ireland, Italy or a shtetl nearly a hundred years ago, Americans do not want to know anything about them except they have been detained and will be deported.
A FAQ on the movie, of sorts
tagged as:- solution
You might find this FAQ based on comments from the director of some use.
American and NATO troops are the real aliens
When the first trailer for the film came out I thought the aliens were the occupiers. One scene from that trailer had an alien saying they wanted to go home, but..., which reminded me of the American troops occupying Iraq. In Iraq and Afghanistan the American and NATO troops are the aliens waiting for hostilities against them to end so they can go home, so I was disappointed to learn it was the aliens who were the victims rather than the earthlings in this film. Still, there are plenty of analogous current events to make the film relevant to our times.
District 9
The aliens were DISGUSTING. It's not an extremely strong premise to hang such a lack of human curiosity, but it's somewhat understandable. They were found starving in their own filth, they look like shellfish, they're just too icky and pathetic to study!
Alienation?
Oh sorry, this is based in South Africa...
(and I'll get out to see it sometime too)
for the curious the CCA is the MNU
From today's Arizona Republic:
"Records from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency show that nine immigrants have died while in custody at Eloy since 2003, two more than reported at any other facility where immigrants have died."
"The nine deaths represent about 9 percent of the total 104 immigrants who have died while in government custody since 2003, according to an analysis by The Arizona Republic.
"Neither ICE nor prison officials could speak immediately Tuesday to the the number of deaths at the Eloy facility, which is run by Corrections Corporation of America under contract with the federal government."
It's not an apartheid allegory
The 29-year-old exiled Afrikaner writer-director Neill Blomkamp has repeatedly made clear in interviews that it's primarily a post-apartheid parable about what's happened to his home country since Nelson Mandela got elected 15 years ago. Here in America, everybody assumes They All Lived Happily Ever After, but Blomkamp, whose family fled crime to Canada in 1997 knows better.
Nobody in America except Armond White, who is black, gets how subversive the premises of the movie are of the reigning conventional wisdom about South Africa.
It's about Zimbabwean illegal immigrants
Among much else, District 9 is about illegal immigration, and about how now that the shoe is on the other foot, black South Africans are about as tolerant of other black Africans as Blomkamp's Afrikaners were toward them:
From an interview in Salon with Blomkamp
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/08/12/blomkamp/print.ht...
Another part of recent South African history that isn't world news is that the collapse of Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. So you have impoverished South African blacks, hoping for a better life in their own country, faced with an influx of millions of impoverished Zimbabweans who have come to South Africa to build a new life for their families. Now you have this powder-keg situation, with black against black, which is highly bizarre.
When we started filming the movie, we had this terrible situation where we woke up one morning to find out that Johannesburg was eating itself alive. Impoverished South Africans had started murdering impoverished Zimbabweans, necklacing them and burning them and chopping them up. That's a very serious piece of contemporary South African society that also finds its way into the film: some impoverished citizens wanting other impoverished citizens out.
Actually, Kevin, I thought
Actually, Kevin, I thought the fact that we didn't learn anything about the aliens was the point. This was the public face of private industry. Remember when Christopher was taken to the experimentation area, he was shocked with what he saw - probably because he had been told, along with the rest of the world, that the MNU had learned nothing. The audience has the position of Christopher (and the public) - we don't know the secrets that the MNU learned because HE doesn't know the secrets that the MNU learned. But they're obviously in a race to unlock alien technology (re: he's the first to survive the transformation so long) and sell it to the governments of the world.
The amazing thing about the movie was just how realistic it was. A private corporation is tasked with managing the situation, they reap billions while engaging in atrocities, and they try their hardest to keep it all secret. Sounds a lot like Blackwater to me.
District 9
Tolstoy on storytelling: You can invent anything but psychology. Which is why I agree with Kevin.
Where can you find UGGS on
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