{"id":457,"date":"2009-09-01T07:39:37","date_gmt":"2009-09-01T12:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/blog\/?p=457"},"modified":"2009-09-01T07:39:37","modified_gmt":"2009-09-01T12:39:37","slug":"sci-fi-sunday-part-two-district-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/01\/sci-fi-sunday-part-two-district-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Sci-Fi Sunday Part Two: District 9"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Sunday before last (part two of our sci-fi Sunday &ndash; part one is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/blog\/?p=452\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>), Glade and I drove down to San Antonio and watched <i>District 9<\/i> with my parents. It was really intense and riveting, although maybe unnecessarily gory. I&#8217;m going to discuss the plot, so if you haven&#8217;t seen it yet, you may want to pass on this post. I tried to avoid any foreknowledge of the plot of the movie going in, which definitely enhanced the experience for me. Ok, you&#8217;ve been warned, here goes:<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure that many of you are already familiar with the premise, which is in the six-minute short <i>Alive in Joburg<\/i> also directed by Neill Blomkamp:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/le3y0QlLjJE\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Unfortunately, this short showcases the main problem that I have with the movie: <i>District 9<\/i> is a <i>Halo<\/i> movie set in <i>Slumdog Millionaire<\/i>. When <i>Millionaire<\/i> was up for many Academy Awards this past February, it was accused of fetishizing poverty, but <i>District 9<\/i> takes it a step further &ndash; the physical setting of the slum called <i>District 9<\/i> was a slum that was being evacuated while the movie was being filmed, according to this interview with director Neill Blomkamp on <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5341120\/5-things-you-didnt-know-about-district-9\">io9<\/a>, which makes the movie mirror reality a little too closely for me to be entirely comfortable with it. Similarly, all of the quotes in the short from non-actor South Africans come from asking them about immigrants to Johannesburg from other parts of Africa, according to that same io9 interview.<\/p>\n<p>As far as the <i>Halo<\/i> connection goes, all of those action sequences in the short look like <i>Halo<\/i> cut scenes to me. And then we get to <i>District 9<\/i>, and all of the action sequences (not to mention the weapons and the mech) look like they were lifted straight from the <i>Halo<\/i> movie that Peter Jackson and Blomkamp were gonna make until it got canned, and they decided to go with <i>District 9<\/i>! I enjoy good action sequences, but these had too much in common with first-person shooters and they made the movie seem unbalanced to me. I was hoping for more sci fi ideas and less guns.<\/p>\n<p>It may seem that I disliked the movie, but I enjoyed it. It just didn&#8217;t live up to the hype for me, especially when it came out a few months after <i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hypercastle.com\/blog\/?p=211\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Moon<\/a><\/i>, an intelligent, minimal sci-fi movie following the footsteps of <i>2001<\/i> and Tarkovsky&#8217;s <i>Solaris<\/i>. All that being said, there was one thing in the movie that really, really worked for me, and that was Wikus&#8217; slow, horrific, and grotesque transformation in a prawn. No matter how unrealistic it may be scientifically (unless, of course, DNA has been seeded thruout the cosmos by benevolent urpeople), it really worked for me emotionally, and it&#8217;s the fulcrum around which all of the action and character development of the movie takes place. I&#8217;ve always been fascinated by the role that limnal beings play in narrative and myth, so it was excited to see a major movie take that up as its central theme. I also appreciated how important the Nigerian gangster&#8217;s belief in sympathetic magic (which can manifest as &#8220;If I eat you, I&#8217;ll gain your power&#8221;) was in the movie. So, despite <i>District 9<\/i>&#8216;s shortcomings, I think it was one of the better sci-fi movies that I&#8217;ve seen, and I&#8217;ll see the sequel, <i>District 10<\/i>, if they make it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Sunday before last (part two of our sci-fi Sunday &ndash; part one is here), Glade and I drove down to San Antonio and watched District 9 with my parents. It was really intense and riveting, although maybe unnecessarily gory. I&#8217;m going to discuss the plot, so if you haven&#8217;t seen it yet, you may [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[189,466],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-reviews","tag-district-9","tag-neill-blomkamp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hypercastle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}