perldiver

avivasedai and I went to see District 9 last night. In a word: bleh.

The basic story without spoilers:

This is a pseudo-documentary movie in which a giant startship shows up and hovers over Johannesburg, South Africa for three months doing nothing. Humanity finally gets tired of waiting, cuts their way in, and finds over a million malnourished insectoid aliens. The MNU (Multi National Union or some such) skylifts them down to a "temporary" housing facility, where the aliens live for 20 years; during this time, the housing facility turns into a militarized slum called "District 9". Finally, alien technology does not work for humans because the aliens have designed it to work only for someone of their DNA; therefore, in 20 years, alien technology has no impact whatsoever on humanity.

Our story opens when MNU has decided to evict the aliens ("prawns" as the slur goes) and move them to a new facility farther from the city. Since eviction would normally require 24 hours notice, they send in the first battalion, led by a political appointee, to get every alien to sign a waiver so they can be moved immediately.

Things go explosively downhill from there.


Here are my non-spoiler objections to this movie:

• Dear Mr Jackson: Please look up the word "subtlety" in a dictionary, as the concept clearly escapes you. Thank you. --Dks

• The complete lack of plot. This movie is pretty much "people commit violence, usually with weapons. Some of the people are aliens."

• The complete absence of sympathetic characters. I didn't really care about any of the characters in this movie (well, I wanted to see the bald battalion leader die). But the main characters, human and alien? Didn't give a damn. The chibi-eyed little alien kid was cute, but I didn't care much about him either--besides, his presence felt manipulative.

• The complete lack of plausibility.
  
  
  
  • 20 years, over a million compliant aliens and absolutely zero impact on humanity? Come on. They were stronger than humans, able to leap higher, and could eat just about anything vaguely organic (e.g. rubber), and their weapons and other technology worked for them. In reality they would have been hired as construction workers, biological waste disposal units, grunt troops in mercenary units, and a thousand other things. Bonus: they could have been paid in catfood.
  
  
  • The aliens were all confined to District 9. Aside from hammering home the point about apertheid, why were there signs all over Johannesburg saying "no aliens"?
  
  
  • The entire movie was predicated on the idea "we need to move them because humans are complaining that they are too close, and they commit crimes." Yet, again, I say--the aliens were confined to their camp. When exactly would humans and aliens meet?
  
  
  • Ok, let's assume that the two separate layers of razor-wire topped fence actually did not suffice to keep the aliens in, and so the crime problems were the result of aliens that slipped out of District 9. I have to think that adding more guards to keep them in would be simpler and cheaper than building a new facility and relocating all of them 200 km, where you will still need guards in order to keep them inside the new facility.
  • Um...so, hang on. You needed to give them 24 hours notice before evicting them, but you decided to go in with troops and do it right now instead? Wouldn't it have been easier to just do it the other way? You could have flown over the place in helicopters on Monday, shouting down with bullhorns "We will evict you tomorrow!", and then come back on Tuesday with the troops and armored trucks and done it.
  
  
  • In 20 years, with full access to the technology on their ship and whatever they brought down on the airlift with them, we managed to reverse engineer nothing?

• CUT IT OUT WITH THE GORRAM SHAKICAM ALREADY! When Blair Witch Project did it, it was novel and impressive. Now it's just nauseating. The premise of this movie is that it's a documentary made by real professionals. These people own Steadicams and are not afraid to use them!

The spoileriffic plot version, if you're interested (I wasn't):

 MNU is pointlessly brutal and callous. (e.g. "Oh, look! You've set up a creche to grow alien babies without a reproduction license! Let me pull out the feeding tubes from the reasonably-full-developed child, burn it with a flamethrower, and then laugh about how the popping noise that sounds like popcorn is really alien eggs exploding!" This is done on camera.  There are likewise horrific secret medical experiments (think "vivisection") carried out on the aliens; again, you see some of this on camera.

When the movie opens, the audience discovers (although the MNU does not) that there are apparently two surviving "command caste" aliens. For 20 years they have been going through the scraps of alien technology on the local junkheap in order to locate drips and drops of "fluid" (fuel, or general McGuffinite) for their starship. Once they have enough, they can fly their concealed shuttle ship (which was set up at the beginning, thankfully--it's not a complete surprise) away and get help. On the very day of the eviction, they finally have enough. Unfortunately, in the process of the eviction, one of the command caste aliens is killed and Wikus (pronounced Vikus; he's the main character and the political appointee leading the eviction) finds the cylinder of fluid; being a fumble-fingered idiot, it sprays goop in his face, so he confiscates it. Pretty quickly, he starts transforming into an alien. Within a day, his left arm has transformed.  Again, we get to watch gratuitous scenes of him peeling off his fingernails on camera.

Suddenly, he's interesting to the government because he can use alien weapons. They know that if they wait too long he will complete the transformation, so they decide to "harvest" his component organs and use them for research. He breaks loose, escapes to District 9 (the alien holding area) and eventually teams up with the remaining smart alien, who goes by the name "Christopher Jones." Together, the two of them break into MNU headquarters, rescue the cylinder, blow the crap out of everything, and escape. On the way back, there is a huge mecha-vs-human-troops battle which separates them; Wikus heroically sends Christopher on ahead while he makes a last stand. Christopher escapes, Wikus transforms, the movie ends, huzzah.

More objections, involving spoilers:

• These aliens have not just anti-gravity technology but also negative-gravity (showing just how advanced they are), but human technology can cut through their starship hull, and South Africa has SAM missiles that can shoot the engine right off an alien shuttlecraft? Um...yeah.

• Let's say you're a command-caste alien. When the humans cut their way into your ship, why not greet them?

• For that matter, since the ship had enough fuel to reach home and apparently needed only food (the aliens were malnourished when they showed up), why not just say "Hi, we'll trade you all this advanced bioengineering information and the secret to anti-gravity for ten million cans of catfood" and then leave?

• Ok, let's try to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Christopher was born on Earth and learned everything he knew either from hidden alien teaching devices or from genetic memory. You are Christopher. You have considerable mental gifts and two possibilities in front of you. Do you:
  
  • A) Spend 20 years living in a dangerous slum gathering drops of McGuffinite and trying to keep your secret laboratory hidden in hope that you can one day fly away before you are discovered and stopped?
  • B) Spend a few months thinking up a safe way to make contact with the world press, then reveal your presence as an intelligent alien, and try to work out a deal that will get you and your people out of their current hellish existence?