I think where your getting hung up on is the traditional view of aliens landing on earth. Fiction often assumes that the aliens want to take over and claim the planet as their own, or kill off the humans etc. And yes, they do have superior firepower like disintigration guns, battle mechs, etc. There are, however, a few points that I think are relevant.
First, the question of intelligence and social stucture is key here. Clearly the “intelligent” ruling elites are absent from the film with only one or two exceptions (CJ and his homey). A good guess is that they were killed off in whatever calamity disabled the ship. The rest of the prawns are a base intelligence working class with little ability to organize unless they are being directed to do so. Perfect example is a beehive. Without a queen, the bees still live in the hive and act like bees, but they are very disorganized and haphazzard. These hives are reffered to as not being “queenright”.
So yes, they have superior weapons, but the “worker bees” are only programmed to work, not enable an armed insurrection. As for the battle mech in particular, it was very clearly proven in the film that though the mech was vastly superior in technology and firepower, it was destroyed within 10 minutes of it being activated. So clearly. a well organized defense by the humans would be adequeate to stop and serious takeover plan.
Also we have to consider that would such a technologically and culturally advanced society see it as “right” to eradicate humans in an all out war. If we were transported back to neanderthal times with our culture and a cache of weapons, would we consider conquering of the more primitive species a good plan? Or would we recognize that even though we are intellectually and technologically superior, armed eradication of the neanderthals is not the best course of action. Think Star Trek prime directive.
As for the fluid question, it was made clear that the ship fuel they were using was a highly concentrated form of their base gel. It probably took hundreds of liters and oh, I don’t know maybe twenty or so years for 2 aliens to collect and distill enough fluid to start the ship.
Anyway, those are my thoughts so far, sorry about the long post and thanks for the great discussion.
Eh, until that point Wikus was certainly running a deficit in the homey department… Shit, he knocked Chris out, endangered his son, escape plan, crashed his ship, etc.
Wikus redeemed himself, but only in the last ten minutes or so. Christopher was much more the straight player. He only made the ‘three years’ swap after seeing what the MNU was doing to his people (which Wickus had first hand knowledge of, BTW.)
Yea i gots to agree with Senior Pike. Wikus almost did not come back to the aid of Chris. The choice for him to come back was big but I still think that Chris has the upper hand in good dudeyness. He was acting to save his species (at least on earth) whereas Wikus was working to save only himself. Also Chris never intentionally put Wikus in harms way where as Wikus did many many things that put Chris in a tight spot.
Knocked him out cause CJ was gonna leave his sorrybarb on Earth as a prawn for 3 years.
First hand knowledge when they kidnapped him AND experimented on him just like the prawns…
There’s no guarentee that the ship wouldn’t have been shot down if CJ was piloting so endangering his kid, escape plan, and crashed his ship is null to me.
What exactly did CJ do for Wikus…ever? I mean a token gesture of “Nah I’m not gonna leave you <_< Oh it’s cool? Alright peace”? He used Wikus to get the weapons, to get inside MNU, to get the fuel, to escape, and STILL left him on earth as a prawn for at least 3 years
For a noble cause, though. Wickus at this point understands that the prawns are being abused, their identity and culture dsetroyed while they are rtreated as pests. It’s the right thing to do, to help CJ and co.
Small correction there. Pretty sure I remember him asking, “What is this place?” over and over and over when he was rolled through there. He was an administrator, and a fairly low-level one. He had no knowledge of dissection and weapons research, he served them notices of eviction.
…oh, and for the record, this discussion kicks ass. We haven’t had a good movie discussion at this level in a long time. Thank you District 9 for proving your awesomeness once again.
they might not want to take over but they were clearly willing to fight back, but not with the weapons they had.
I know they wight have said the ship was disabled, but it really wasnt. It was simply unoperable because the mini piolot ship wasnt attached. And that just needed fuel. The ship wasnt broken, just out of gas.
Yes, but the bees still can sting you if you piss one off. and if you piss many off they might all sting you. I wourdnt expect a rebellion/revolution from the workers, but I really needed to see armed attacks, even if done on an individual level.
I really did enjoy it, and thought it was good, but certanly not great, and it didn’t last for multiple viewings. However, the first viewing was excellent.
Its plausible that the workers may not have fully understood how the weapons worked. We did see the prawns fight back. They ripped apart many of the UMN workers. I also think Chris was just a worker who was starting to evolve, not much just enough for him to know he had to go back to his home planet and get some helpers.
Like someone said above i think you are still thinking of the prawns in context of previous alien movies to some extent. This is one of the first movies where the aliens have no agenda they just exist and are helpless creatures trying to survive.
Yes, this is an excellent point, and one that was demonstrated in the film at the end. The prawns did show a sort of hive like intelligence when they detected a serious threat to one of their own. But they used only the weapons that they were familiar with and knew how to use. Namely their claws, teeth, etc. I think even if you handed them the guns, they still wouldn’t know what to do with them.
It would be akin to tossing a bunch of tiny AK-47’s into the beehive and expecting the bees to know how to use them. They would simply ignore them and use their stingers. Which again, makes sense in the larger context. If you are a limited number rulling class with millions of workers to control, do you really want them to have access to your weapons technology? Sounds like a easy recipe for revolution. Just add unrest and simmer for a few months.
Thanks for you comments, really enjoying the thread!
I just had a thot. What if the ship was used to get rid of excess population? Like they sent all the dumb aliens off to the first habitable planet they could find and then have the piloting module fall off cause they don’t want them coming back.
But the aliens were like “We’re not going without weapons” and they were like “K…you’re too frakkin stupid to use them anyway so here ya go, have some anti-personal weapons”
Yes, I know of Apartheid. Pretty darn sure they were sets, made to look like real slums in Johanesberg. Mentioning nanotech does not explain the metamorphosis even a little bit. But whatever, man, I guess pointless, meandering, heavy-handed allegory equals visionary, the market has spoken.
We here at chez Casilda are a bit behind the times, but I finally saw District 9 this week and loved it. It’s definitely my kind of movie - I really like social film (don’t know if that’s the right English term though) and ambiguities (e.g. I’m cool with the end of BSG). One of my friends who says she dislikes science fiction also loved D9 - it speaks to a larger audience than many speculative fiction films, and in a way that most summer sci-fi stuff doesn’t.
This thread is interesting to read now - I’m impressed at how (mostly) positive and respectful it is. Of course not everyone has to like the movie, but having read through I think a lot of the dislike comes from stylistic issues and perhaps a bit of resistance to the content? Or I could be over-interpreting.
I’ll chime in with those who respectfully disagree - the most powerful part of the film was the last portion for me.
This has been the big discussion around our house after seeing the movie - we’d love for there to be a District 10 There is so much openness in the ending it’s awesome.
re: Wickus trying to fly the ship himself. I think Mr. Lister Sir’s got it - plus, Wickus is always a bit of an idiot. He doesn’t ever seem to think things through.
That moment made me teary, too. Heck, the movie in general made me teary! I did find the film entertaining - but entertaining in the way I find difficult documentaries entertaining. Edifying might be a more accurate term, perhaps.
So true, I’m in complete agreement.
I also didn’t see any plot holes.
My area of expertise is about parts of the world where incredibly barbaric things were done by many different parties to many different peoples, and the rest of the world at best stood by and did nothing, and at worst encouraged the abuses. Even here in the US working with immigrant communities, well, perhaps the overt actions of the film aren’t common but the attitudes expressed about the aliens (ironic that that’s a term to refer to non-citizens, too) are sadly not uncommon.
Wickus reminds me of characters in novels, films, etc that collaborate without really knowing the big picture, the little bureaucrats - the little guy who does the paperwork about prison camp inmates, the person who chooses not to look when their neighbor is carted off in the middle of the night, the doctor who pretends that hir patients aren’t obviously the victims of institutionalized abuse. That (depressing) ubiquity makes his otherwise outrageous situation (aliens living in slums in Johannesburg) hit much closer to home.
I don’t think we necessarily see a Christopher Johnson arc - but I have two possible thots on that. The first being that CJ is so single minded about getting his son out and helping his people that there’s no room for change. The other is again stylistic - the aliens are so different and presented in such a dehumanized (ha) way that we aren’t equipped to notice character changes. We don’t have the context - there’s an incommensurability that we can’t bridge.
Agreed. Wikus was low-level, and as is quite common in authoritarian environments, the low-level workers don’t know (willingly or not) about some of the more egregious atrocities being committed.
I particularly enjoyed the corporate angle - in some ways it makes sense, because what national government would want to take responsibility for the refugees (ahem RL parallels). It felt quite Whedonesque in the anti-corporate portrayal of MNU.
All of this said, the worst (best) part for me was the end, when Wickus’s wife talks about the junk flower she found on her doorstep. sob
There is so much openness in the ending it’s awesome.