I’ve got a stack of “for your consideration” screeners that have come in the last few weeks, so I’ll pull out a few of them that I actually want to watch and review.
The first is District 9 (2009), about alien refugees who arrive in Johannesburg and are relegated to second-class-sentient status in filthy shantytowns. (Psst: It’s an allegory.)
#1 by Chad R. on December 3, 2009 - 2:28 am
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Was I the only one who found District 9 both much stupider and much more ambiguous than it’s commonly considered?
#2 by DaveC on December 3, 2009 - 2:51 am
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Considering that I refuse to pay money to be preached at, I’ll never know,Chad.
#3 by Nathan Shumate on December 3, 2009 - 7:00 am
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Chad, I thought it was kind of light on plot, but that’s okay; the acting and the technical production (not just the picture-perfect CGI but the overall cinematography and editing) made up for it. But yes, anyone who says it’s a really really smart movie is really saying, “I’m really really smart for ‘getting’ it!”
#4 by El Santo on December 3, 2009 - 10:47 am
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I don’t really believe you’re supposed to “find” the subtext and think you’re smart. It looks more to me like District 9 was designed to be instantly recognizable as an Apartheid parable by anybody old enough or well enough educated to remember or know about Apartheid in the first place.
#5 by El Santo on December 3, 2009 - 10:52 am
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I also think (it occurs to him to say a moment after clicking “Submit Comment”) that it’s as much about South Africa’s present-day immigration difficulties as it is about horrible stuff that happened 20 years and more ago.
#6 by Nathan Shumate on December 3, 2009 - 11:04 am
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Let me rephrase it, then: A lot of the praise for this movie came from people who thought that the subtext was cleverly hidden, and they were gosh-darned proud of it.
And the director has been a Canadian resident for a decade, so I think it’s more informed by what he remembers from his South African childhood than what he reads in the paper. (I’m not saying that other immigration woes couldn’t have informed it, but it’s still a very apartheidy tale, what with the “No non-humans allowed” ad campaign.)
#7 by El Santo on December 3, 2009 - 11:46 am
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“I’m not saying that other immigration woes couldn’t have informed it”
They very definitely did. In Alive in Joburg, the short that District 9 was based on, Blomkamp got most of his “man in the street” interview footage by pretending to be a TV reporter asking passers by to describe their opinions of refugees from Zimbabwe.
#8 by Nathan Shumate on December 3, 2009 - 11:50 am
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Iiinteresting.
#9 by KeithA on December 3, 2009 - 8:20 pm
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I think anyone who tells themselves D9 wassubtle and they were clever for “getting it” — well, that’s the fault of the viewer, I think, more than the movie, which never once plays it subtle or coy with its message. I didn’t mind — reminded me of the clumsy moralizing in old scifi films, and I love that.
Glad I’m not the only one who thought, “why the hell have the humans not been poking around on that spaceship since it arrived?”
#10 by El Santo on December 3, 2009 - 10:11 pm
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Incidentally, Nathan– the little atom graphic you use for your Grand Index links? It isn’t displaying correctly on the new links you’ve been adding lately, at least not on Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
#11 by Nathan Shumate on December 3, 2009 - 10:29 pm
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I’ve been noticing that happening inconsistently. (Happens to Keith’s links sometimes, too — I’ve fixed it when I’ve seen it.) WordPress sometimes decides to abbreviate the URL of the image, which is fine in the preview pane, but points to the wrong place from the published page. Silly WordPress.
#12 by Joshua on December 4, 2009 - 5:56 am
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Type your comment here
Dang, El Santo really does know everything!
#13 by Chad R. on December 5, 2009 - 11:41 am
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Well, when I said I thought it was stupider than most people seemed to be crediting, I wasn’t referring to the ham-handed apartheid allegory. I was thinking more of the Star Wars linguistics, the Stargate Atlantis biochemistry, and all the other little details that made no sense. Where did the aliens get their weapons? They were evidently ferried to the ground in military helicopters. Did they smuggle that powered armor in their carry-on luggage? As others have mentioned, why was everyone so interested in the aliens’ slightly-better-than-ours weapons while ignoring the secrets of antigravity, faster-than-light travel, and whatever energy source powers them? Was nobody studying the spaceship? There didn’t seem to be anybody on board at the end.
As for the movie being more ambiguous than others seem to consider, I came away from it thinking they made a very subtle case for keeping the aliens locked up in an internment camp.
#14 by El Santo on December 5, 2009 - 1:40 pm
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I’m not sure what you mean by “Star Wars linguistics,” unless it’s the part about humans and aliens having learned to understand each other’s languages, but being unable to speak them. Personally, I score that as a point in District 9‘s favor. That form of partial bilinguality can be found among humans as it is; you see it especially when speakers of two languages that use drastically different groups of sounds come together. For example, I expect that I’d train my ears to distinguish among the nine vowel tones of Cantonese long before I’d manage to train my mouth to form them, and that’s a language that you simply cannot speak intelligibly until you the tones at least close to right. In a context where the interlocutors’ mouthparts physically can’t form most of each other’s phonemes, what other option for spoken communication would there be?
As for the weapons, notice that apart from MNU’s research & development department, it’s mostly not the aliens who have them, but the Nigerian mob. My assumpation is that there had been an armory aboard the ship, and that the contents of it had been brought down to Earth by a combination of the South African military and MNU operatives, probably along with anything else portable that could be found inside the ship. I don’t think Obesandjo’s gangsters got their alien weapons (power armor suit included) from the aliens themselves, but rather through a combination of payoffs to corrupt officers and brigandage against convoys transporting the stuff to wherever it was meant to be stored. Blomkamp never says that’s what happened, of course, but it would be well enough within what might be expected of Third World gangsters to make a fairly safe assumption.
#15 by Nathan Shumate on December 5, 2009 - 6:07 pm
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I have to give a vote in favor of Star Wars-style conversations, at least among Terran languages. I used to be close to fluent in Japanese, and I loved getting to the point with English-speaking Japanese acquaintances when we could each speak our own language but understand the other perfectly.
The part about the weapons… See my earlier comment on scaffolding. In essence, I think that the determination to make an apartheid/immigration allegory overpowered the logical extrapolation that should govern the scenario.
#16 by MatthewF on December 8, 2009 - 3:00 pm
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I enjoyed the film a lot and am actually pleased that it didn’t spend it’s time explaining things as it could have. It had problems, as it seemed unsure what kind of film it was; apartied parable, chase movie, docu-drama, robot battles. So yes, it got a lot of praise just because it wasn’t transformers. But it’s a nice little movie with a lot of good things going for it. I didn’t find it preachy beyond the standard ‘why can’t we all get along’. Certainly it was about ten thousand times better than AlienNation.