“A simple scene in which demonstrators are outside the doors of the government demanding justice for the aliens would have done wonders. I don’t know.”

Either you slept through the movie or you are just trolling. They DID have this scene. You REALLY need to rewatch it… several times, because you obviously missed 90% of the movie.

I haven’t read all of this and I’m not going to. Its a horse… and its beaten. We have differences of opinions – which is a good thing.

I could care less about plot holes – both movies had them and every movie has them. I’m not getting hung up on plot holes with either movie. I’m getting hung up on the fact that one movie has a plot at all while the other one doesn’t.

However, I’ve just gone back and watched the beginning of District 9 again and in the first 2 minutes of the film they say “the eyes of the world were on Johannesburg, so we had to do the right thing.” There’s your whole justification for and explanation for D9 right there, right up front.

I definitely hope you enjoy it more the second time through!

So 1) These Aliens never showed any imminent threat to the ecosystem or planet aside from the potential of over populating, which the nice people at MNU diligently kept in check. And 2) The biggest defense against an attempted genocide (or in this case xenocide) is getting attention. A giant flying city gets a lot of damned attention. Theirs no way something that big wouldn’t set off every major powers varied detection systems immediately. What exactly would the MNU or officials of Johannesburg tell the US, UK, Russia, China, or any other 1st world nation was up with the giant floating city and early reports of bugmen? Do you think the likes of the US or China would skip a single heartbeat if they could use world opinion as a pretense to go in and snatch that puppy (or, if unable to move, “occupy” territory in South Africa until they were able to do so).

Theirs no way S.A. or the MNU would have been able to get away with outright annihilation of the entire group. The political costs from the super powers to the scientific community to civil rights watch groups would have been enormous, and there’s no way to cover it up.

The scenario you put forward requires a great deal more than just the prawns showing up. In most cases of genocide you have a rivalry of local cultures that sometimes spans millenia. We’re talkin’ Crusade level, “This is my Holy land”-”No, this is MY Holy Land” kinda build up of tension (Remember that the word “Ghetto” comes from the segregated districts that Jews were forced to live in for hundreds of years before the Nazi’s went ape-sh*t on the whole “racial purity” BS). It was made apparent in the movie that at the beginning most people were at least somewhat sympathetic, and the prawns didn’t start causing any kind of trouble until they had regained their strength after starving for months aboard the mothership

As for the aliens with no redeeming qualities, I’m kinda sad to report that you replace prawn with any number of epithets, and I can probably say I’ve heard those words out of a real live persons mouth. But none of these people would ever attempt a massacre. It takes more than just a low opinion of some group to justify eradication. Plus, you have to remember that one of those prawns could take almost a full clip from your average SMG and complain about the tickle. In a purely physically sense they were the “superior” species. An out right conflict with them could easily be foreseen as having potentially dire consequence. You don’t give your lower class a rally point. Don’t give them a REASON to get motivated, get organized, and mount a true defense. That’s exactly what the white powers in S.A. did with the natives. Keep them demeaned but not too much, keep them hungry, but not too much, and so on.

And my final point: Both these movies were written with obvious and stated intentions at at least one sequel, so the fat lady hasn’t sung on either of these IP’s. Maybe Avatar 2: Avatar Harder will have a deep and impactful rhetoric on the criticality of geo-politics in a nomadic versus agrarian culture collision. And District 9 II: The Return of WIkus might be 90 straight minutes of giant cockroaches kicking the living crap outta a bunch of pitiful humans (Or maybe we’ll get “District 10 vs. B13″ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_B13] my god, I think I’d actually watch that).

District 9: Apartheid meets Franz Kafka’s The Metaporphosis. “Racism, racism, facsism, oh no im turning into one myself, cue guns and shift in main character’s worldview!”

Avatar: Pocahontas meets Dances With Wolves meets Fern Gully. “Racism, corporate greed, evil white man, oh no now ive fallen in love with their culture and banged their princess, cue guns and shift in main character’s worldview!”

In the end, neither of them impressed me on the thematic or story levels, however i do think that Peter Jackson’s weta workshop approached the special effects and props on a more creative, and by far much less pretentious level. So go him.

Though I haven’t seen Avatar yet (I see most movies on DVDs since we have a 108in projector set up at our house), I definitely like D9, and this article (and commentators) do it a great deal of justice. It definitely had flaws, but I did enjoy it’s overall tenor and basic rhetoric. I’ve used similar style aspects in more than a few games I’ve run, particularly DnD (in fact, overused it to the point that regular players labeled one of my tropes). I was always wary of DnD’s blanket Good/Evil alignment assumptions so I often jiggered with many of the preconceptions, which is something I think D9 aimed at and at least modestly accomplished. I’ve always enjoyed playing with the concepts of Good people doing Bad things for Good reason or Bad people doing Good things for Good reasons (and all 25 other possible variations on that formula) as a nice way of keeping my player’s guessing, but I’ve often also tried to “humanize” some of the fodder races by at least explaining why they act the way they do. Goblins raid and loot because they never developed agrarian culture, living as nomads and scavengers throughout there history. Kobolds have always been the advance forces of Dragons looking for roosts which is why they so habitually “squat” on un-kept territory. Hobgoblins are a Stalinist-like reaction to the so-called “civilised” races unmitigated slaughter of their kin. I’ve also played out more than a few times about the redeeming qualities of Lawful Evil. Those rare few who make the hard decisions that would make most any one else sick. I’ve also like handing my players the no-good-win scenario (“would you like the Moral Failure, the Unethical Success, or the Pyrrhic Victory this time?”) though those are obviously hard to keep going and keep original. So in summary, I think my personal like of D9 is essentially it’s sticking to moral relativism and, in DnD i’ve come to calling it “Mortalism” as an alternative to “Humanism”. Yes, the prawns are kinda scummy, but does that mean it’s okay to treat them like scum? Do the ends sometimes, always or never justify the means? Does this apply to just you or everybody?

(BTW, The inclusion of the Nigerian scam artists was just purely hysterical for me)

I’ll go watch District 9 again as you suggest, to see if I missed any vital details that would make it more plausible and enjoyable. But, by the same token, I think you need to watch Avatar again. To use your own words against you: In my opinion you’re mistaking Avatar for being simple because you either did not pay enough attention to it and therefore did not understand it.

Actually, as has been shown earlier, Avatar’s story has a lot more meat to it than you are giving it credit.

The human characters of Avatar are not cardboard cutouts. Outside of those humans that don’t have speaking parts, each of them clearly expresses a differing agenda and motive. You can’t make every background figure in a movie have in-depth detail and a speaking part. You CAN, though, show a cast of major characters representative of the whole, each providing a viewpoint you can find among the masses (i.e. there are the human characters who view things scientifically, there are humans who just follow orders, there are the soldiers who think for themselves, etc.). If one character brings up a certain viewpoint, you can assume there are at least a few others who are questioning the same things and are holding to similar viewpoints.

The problem I see with District 9 is that it lacks a character or two (among the aliens and the humans) or a scene or two to show the differences found among the respective species. A simple scene in which demonstrators are outside the doors of the government demanding justice for the aliens would have done wonders. I don’t know. As it stands, though, the movie portrays all humans as looking down on the aliens the same way, and the aliens as acting only one way.

I also can’t help but laugh that you’re arguing for “substance and meat” and “subtlety” when your opinion is in favor of a movie like Avatar. There is so little of any of those in it, the only subtlety is in details that don’t even matter to the story at all. The humans in Avatar are EXACTLY cardboard cutouts except for the 3-4 main characters.

In my opinion you’re mistaking District 9 for being simple because you either did not pay enough attention to it and therefore did not understand it. The movie does not portray every single prawn as being worthless and disgusting, and it only shows a handful of them committing violence against humans. Also the argument that “you only need to keep a few of them alive to research” doesn’t disprove what happened in District 9, it would be stupid for the humans to nuke a million of them away and only keep a handful when they have no idea how long it’s going to take them to figure out the weaponry. You could just as easily argue that they’d keep the shanty town there for continued weapons research, it’s just as easy to get rid of them once you’ve figured things out, and really if your opinion is so low of humanity why not believe that they’d keep beings imprisoned in a slum than give them the dignity of dying instead of living in filth and degradation?

Anyway, I think this huge comments thread just goes to prove that tastes differ. Who would have thought it, eh?

And I understand the movie producers were trying to create an Apartheid situation. It COULD have worked. I’m just saying the producers’ portrayal of an Apartheid situation is way too simplistic. Apartheid is not simple. Give us substance and meat! Show us subtlety. Show the true diversity of humanity. Give the aliens more depth than cardboard cutouts.

Maybe most humans view the aliens as worthless and disgusting, but throw in a few “do-gooder” characters who complicate the plot to show why the humans don’t try to kill the aliens. You could also show some scenes from the perspective of the aliens (or the do-gooder characters) to show that the aliens are actually more redeeming and docile than they seem to be.

Create a BELIEVABLE Apartheid situation. Show us why this situation would exist at all. The way the movie portrays the situation, though, it would result in war and extermination almost immediately. To be frank, it’s not an accurate portrayal of an Apartheid situation at all.

I think the simplest, although it’s also kind of a scapegoat, answer is because District 9 is based on Apartheid. The aliens showed up on earth sick and leaderless (both things that are addressed in the beginning of the movie), and the humans granted them asylum but then things got out of hand pretty quickly. There are examples of this happening in history as well.

“The unlikeable aliens. Fanstastic! Any true alien lifeform would be, well, alien. It would be extrmemely unlikely that humans could easily identify with them.”

I agree. So why would the humans bother to let them live at all? They are portrayed in the movie as being so unlikable to the humans (and dangerous) that no reason is given for keeping them alive. I addressed this earlier, by the way. Here is a snippet repeated:

“…as it stands, the way the aliens are portrayed in the movie, I can’t bring myself to believe humans would allow them to continue to exist once an alien showed any violent tendencies, especially when the entire eco-system of the earth is at stake. For god’s sakes we wipe out all kinds of invasive plants and animals on earth right now, just because they come from another continent—let alone another galaxy. We’ve also committed genocide on other humans—who look like us—just because their skin looks different or they have beliefs. Yet these aliens are somewhat tolerated and given more leeway? Even when they are not cute and cuddly, or have any other redeeming value in our human eyes?”

District 9 was sublime. I can see how it would not appeal to people who have had their movie tastes trained by a strict Hollywood diet. That unfortunate situation often leaves an inability to appreciate things that stray from formula. District 9 does some excellent science fiction things not often seen on screen:

The unlikeable aliens. Fanstastic! Any true alien lifeform would be, well, alien. It would be extrmemely unlikely that humans could easily identify with them. District 9 walked the very fine line of conveying this directly to the viewer, making them feel it (show don’t tell), but also giving some room for the audience to start to make a connection as it progresses.

The hero has been discussed. But yes he is much more like a real, flawed person than your average screen protagonist.

The ship breaking down, and other unanswered questions; a major theme of the movie I think (or at least an important point of view) is that life is messy. Things go wrong, things get confused, and it rarely gets neatly sorted out by the ‘end’. Hollywood has trained most movie goers to expect complete resolution. D9 gave only partial resolution – and that is a good thing! But also a very un-american thing. Perhaps us Brits can go along with the South Africans more easily on this one, being on the whole more jaded and less idealistic than our transatlantic cousins.

D9 was one of the most believable alien contact movies I have seen. I left thinking, yes, if contact happens, it will probably be as messy and uncomfortable for everyone as shown there.

Avatar I’m not going to discuss, other to say that it is a fairy story. A great fairy story, but still.

So, you see, the plot is not as simplistic as you are making it out to be…