[General Battuta]

If you're coming into a thread titled 'District frickin 9' and not expecting spoilers...

I mean, I guess, yes, it should be tagged, but this is obviously a reactions thread.

[colecampbell666]

Epic movie, cool, gory, fun. I liked how the aliens

Spoiler:

were working class and for the most part seemingly stupid

Big difference from the normal portrayal.

[Mefustae]

The thing to think about is that District 9 was taking a severely anti-human approach to sci-fi. It drew a lot of attention to a stark divide between humans and prauns, to the point where it's almost insultingly misanthropic!

This is embodied in Wilkus himself and his metamorphosis to one of the prauns. At the opening of the film, when he's completely human, he's a complete and utter wanker. When he's infected, and slowly begins to change, he becomes more sympathetic. Ultimately, when he's past the tipping point and exhibiting more and more praun-like qualities, he becomes almost heroic. It can't be a coincidence that the less human he became, the more sympathetic and likeable he was.

Then there's the portrayal of two family units and the quality thereof. On one hand, you have the praun family of Christopher and his son, and on the other you had the boss-man of the MNU and his daughter. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to decide which was the better, more nurturing relationship.

I really, really love how they did it. It's not often a movie gets me really hoping for humanity to get a kick in the ass by big honking space-guns.

[NGTM-1R]

Part of the genius of it though, is that except for the Ultimate Jim Crow Sign Drop in the beginning, the movie isn't terribly blunt about things. It doesn't put people in black hats, it leaves the black hats laying around and lets people decide to put them on for themselves. There is a sense of choice about it that saves the movie from the "preachy pile of crap that had nice action sequences" category.

[General Battuta]

Yeah. Arguably the prawns did need to be isolated and controlled (though probably not experimented on brutally.) Thought-provoking stuff.

[Bobboau]

I'm going to have to disagree, Wilkus never came off as heroic, he came off as selfish and douchey to the end. granted he was slightly less douchey while he was in the mech, but the fact that he was still a douche in a giant robot doesn't change the fact that he was a douche.

[Colonol Dekker]

He summed himself up by punching chris after retrieving the cylinder.

[iamzack]

Yeah. Arguably the prawns did need to be isolated and controlled (though probably not experimented on brutally.) Thought-provoking stuff.

Chris pretty much proved that prawns weren't uniformly stupid and brutish like the humans wanted to think. They were rounded up and kept in internment camps where humans then restricted education, job opportunities, movement, and even reproduction while using drugs (cat food) to placate them. For two decades. If most of them weren't brutish and stupid after all that, it'd be very surprising.

All the clips in the beginning of the black South Africans talking about relocation of the prawns away from them was for the too-real irony of the hypothetical situation. The apartheid in South Africa only came down a few decades ago, and (in D9) blacks turned around and allowed the exact same oppression they suffered be perpetrated on another group.

Prawns are clearly capable of intelligence on-par with or exceeding human intelligence (how many planets have we sent hundreds of thousands of people to?), and are also clearly capable of all the good "human" emotions like love and justice. Prawns and humans turned out to be more similar than different, IMO.

[Colonol Dekker]

Inter-species prostitution rules in favour of that last sentence too lol.

[General Battuta]

Yeah. Arguably the prawns did need to be isolated and controlled (though probably not experimented on brutally.) Thought-provoking stuff.

Chris pretty much proved that prawns weren't uniformly stupid and brutish like the humans wanted to think. They were rounded up and kept in internment camps where humans then restricted education, job opportunities, movement, and even reproduction while using drugs (cat food) to placate them. For two decades. If most of them weren't brutish and stupid after all that, it'd be very surprising.

All the clips in the beginning of the black South Africans talking about relocation of the prawns away from them was for the too-real irony of the hypothetical situation. The apartheid in South Africa only came down a few decades ago, and (in D9) blacks turned around and allowed the exact same oppression they suffered be perpetrated on another group.

Prawns are clearly capable of intelligence on-par with or exceeding human intelligence (how many planets have we sent hundreds of thousands of people to?), and are also clearly capable of all the good "human" emotions like love and justice. Prawns and humans turned out to be more similar than different, IMO.

I completely agree. But I can understand why some made the argument for isolation and control.

[iamzack]

Ignorance and an unwillingness to see any other creature be more intelligent than humans?

[General Battuta]

No, just a focus on the symptoms of a problem rather than the cause. When you have a group of apparently directionless, rowdy, destructive aliens, almost certainly carrying a virulent and infectious disease, then you probably want to keep them tied up.

I'm not arguing for it but I can see the case.

[NGTM-1R]

Ignorance and an unwillingness to see any other creature be more intelligent than humans?

Safety. Prawns are capable of inflicting terrible injury bare-handed. It's the classic problem with someone with superpowers. With a human, you can just get a bunch of guys to tackle and manhandle and handcuff the guy. With a prawn, that's not an option because it can kill you very easily with its bare hands. (And we saw them do so several times.) That's also the reason why such strenous efforts were started to disarm the prawns; not because we wanted their guns, though we did, but because their weapons are just way too much of a threat to innocent lives and property to leave laying about.

There are also issues of disease, parasitism, unknown physiology, and a host of other things. The camp was inevitable. How it went from there was not.

[iamzack]

An initial camp, I can see an argument for, but for anything beyond that, there is no justification.

[NGTM-1R]

But then you just come back to the guys with superpowers problem.

[iamzack]

The prawns had at least the intelligence capability of humans and as well as human emotional capabilities. Just because they are stronger on average doesn't really mean anything. Men are stronger on average than women and we don't lock them up, do we?

[Scotty]

Yeah, and humans are bastards.

It's a movie.  And until aliens do actually land on Earth and we herd them into a small plot of land in South Africa, I would venture to say that's all it is.

[NGTM-1R]

The prawns had at least the intelligence capability of humans and as well as human emotional capabilities. Just because they are stronger on average doesn't really mean anything. Men are stronger on average than women and we don't lock them up, do we?

A man can't take a woman's head off with one blow. We saw a Prawn do that. We also saw one tear someone's arms off by grabbing a gun they were holding and kicking them. They flew off the camera. That's a good ten feet. I'm not kidding about the "superpowers" bit.

It's a sociological can of worms. How do you handle law enforcement with human officers and prawn criminals, or the other way around? (The answer is unfortunately for the first one that, to preserve their own life, a human officer should simply shoot to kill when confronted with a prawn criminal. The other, however, would actually be much easier since a human isn't going to beat up a prawn too well.)  What constitutes reasonable force against a prawn? How do you balance the prawn's right to life with the danger it poses to innocents and arresting officers?

Ultimately this is a case where seperation of society may, in fact, be necessary for the safety of all concerned. If you can build a seperate, prawn-policed society for the prawns, they'll be safer than in one policed by humans, because presumably prawns are better able to handle physical violence from other prawns then humans are.

[iamzack]

Separate but equal?

[Scotty]

Yes, for lack of a better term.

This time for the safety of all involved, not because some white bastards are feeling superior.