District 9 vs Avatar

Ok enough of these picayune topics, dithering over arcane nuances of writings from deservedly obscure compulsive scribblers who through a trick of fate actually get published. :-)

Time to address the BIG issues, Which is better; The movie District 9 or Avatar? {memo: patent the District 9 alien vs Avatar alien concept}

I saw Avatar over the weekend and thought it was great. I saw the 3D version which worked for me in spite of being a bit wall eyed at times. I advise sitting so that you are about head high to the middle of the screen in viewing if possible- I was looking down a bit.

I was skeptical about Avatar because the special effects looked like cartoon characters on the TV advertisements but I got the "total immersion" effect pretty quickly in spite of being elbowed constantly from all sides during the flick. Without giving any spoilers I thought it was well written & executed although they got around the ftl issue by not mentioning it.

I was surprised that District 9 didn't get a lot more press, the animation was convincing and the story line great. Pretty heavy handed obvious comparisons between the aliens and the disenfranchised people of earth but not in a overbearing manner IMOHO.

I look forward to sequels from either flick but the dream world of Avatar was intense and up to the Trilogy standards but not exceeding them.

::edit:: added a smiley face in case "tongue in cheek" was not obvious & caused offense.

Just stumbled out of Avatar 3-D 45 minutes ago. A ginormous layer cake made almost entirely of frosting. Under all the tinsel and visual candy is a tepid little boy meets girl story along with a none-too-subtle indictment of American social, economic, environmental and military policy. As for the 3-d effects, I saw more impressive work in a Michael Jackson short feature at DisneyWorld 20 years ago.

Yep I agree the themes of Avatar seem a bit simplistic but I was sucked in by the action sequences and character development.

About the 3D stuff, I really have some slight eye problems so I defer on being overly judgmental. To me it seemed like advanced "antialiasing" ,that made the images in the foreground "pop" a bit. I never felt like anything would fall in my lap, if that extreme is possible outside of Bugs bunny cartoons. It worked for me though.

Aha, the official Vatican view of Avatar {courtesy NYT}:

"“gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature,” according to The A.P. Vatican Radio said the movie “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium,” adding, “Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship.” L’Osservatore wrote that for all of the “stupefying, enchanting technology” in the movie, it offers “few genuine emotions.” But both outlets agreed, as L’Osservatore wrote, that the true accomplishment of “Avatar” was its “extraordinary visual impact.” The film is to be released in Italy on Friday."

I thought it was a reincarnation of "The Noble Savage" concept, in that man in nature is benevolent. Which the forest people of S. American seemed to have forgotten with a normal greeting of how they are going to cut off your genitals.

From WIki:

>>During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the figure of the indigene or "savage", and later, increasingly, the "good savage", was held up as a reproach to European civilization, then in the throes of the wars of religion.{1} During one event, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (1572), some ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children were massacred by Catholic mobs, chiefly in Paris, but also throughout France."

My take:

I enjoyed Avatar. It was an amazing tale created by one of the most skilled world-builders in cinema (Ridley Scott and Peter Jackson also come to mind). But the story and the characters were obvious and predictable. I don't have a problem with the fact that it was derivative; there are only so many stories you can tell.

District 9, on the other hand, was a delightful surprise. It was gritty, lived-in, and character-focused. Yes, there were some heavy-handed, one-dimensional villains. But even though making a believable alien tale set in the present is a far tougher task than setting the story in the far future, Blomkamp pulled it off. The clever little bits of humor, the raw emotion, and the smaller-scale (but perhaps more nerve-wracking) violence of District 9 won me over.

#5, "...there are only so many stories you can tell."
I have a book, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations that lists all thirty-six dramatic situations and offers a primer on each one's requirements. This fellow seems pretty certain their are only thirty-six dramatic situations from which to tell stories.

I've just picked up District 9 on DVD (missed it on the big screen) and I'm still blown away by it! A few minor quibbles; the aliens have picked up a few too many human traits to be 101% convincing (or perhaps they would pick up traits?), but the sheer chutzpah of setting a story about dispossessed aliens in South Africa deserves a Hugo all by itself. The documentary style just adds to the real-world feel, and the photography is stunning. The mother ship seen through the morning haze or catching the reflections of the sun is utterly convincing. And the glimpse of the other alien culture - that is, (for most of us) SA - sets this film apart. The township stuff was actually filmed in part of Soweto.

I expect to be impressed by Avatar - still to catch it at our local IMAX - but it'll have to go some in the non-technical departments to beat District 9.

I guess I'm the heretic in the bunch.

I thought District 9 boring. I didn't like the way it was filmed, didn't care much about the characters and felt no connection to anything in it.

Avatar I adored. I cared, I was sucked in, and the world was complex and intriguing.

If I were going to watch one of the two a second time, it would be District 9. Although Avatar was beautiful, District 9 made me think.
And while I'm in comparison mode, 9 also had amazing visuals, but thinking about the ending makes me cringe.

Avatar was Dances with Wolves in space. But it was beautifully done. The 3D was wonderful- I don't know what you mean by cartoony- I could see every leaf on every tree distinctly like no other movie I have ever seen. The CG was amazingly done, the love story was just enough, the action (the flying!) was great. My only qualm about Avatar is that the ending felt rushed compared to the rest of the movie (From the end fight to movie end could have had a good 5-10 mins added).

I definitley liked Avatar more than District 9. There was way too much of the "Let's appeal to the 18 yo male audience with gore and violence" for me, and the first half was a bit too dragged out. I did however appreciate the underlying parallel to the apartheid in South Africa.

Kat, Avatar characters do not present well on my television when the movie is advertised. They look more animated. In the movie itself the characters are pretty flawless as far as I can tell. That was what I meant to say at least.

The real life genocides in Africa, featuring machetes, human bonfires and burning tires around people, make District 9 look like a Sunday school picnic. I wake up with nightmares when they are just described verbally on the BBC at night as I am nodding off. I think the sanitized movie violence is a thinly veiled metaphor for the actual violence in Africa. IMOHO

10: Ok, I'll disagree. Avatar is not Dances with Wolves in space. Dances with Wolves actually has depth and is a great movie. Avatar is a pretty shallow movie.

I saw the preview and honestly I figured out the whole plot just from it, so my sights were pretty low. But I was surprised - I enjoyed the movie. The human characters were weak, the plot was predictable (except I kept expecting Ents to come at the end), and the science/technology was questionable. But the special effects and immersion were great.

I have the feeling that if Avatar were a book, not a movie, it would be written off as just another SF book and not much more.

Yes, I saw Avatar last night and agree that it looks gorgeous, the immersion is total and the 3D isn't over-done. I saw the trailer and it looked very CGI-ish, but the finished film is very different. I even peeped over the 3D glasses a couple of times and the impression is that the sparkle the images get isn't just from the 3D.

Trailers are often made with early cuts from principal photography instead of the final version that's been through post. After all, they have to be out well in advance of the film being ready for release. It can be quite interesting to look at the trailers offered with DVDs to compare the trailer with the finished film.

Having said that, if it wasn't for the 3D, the story in Avatar wouldn't necessarily merit all the hype and effort put into the film. Were it not for the 3D, Cameron might have been better off trying to make 'Ringworld'.

The other argument is how derivitive Avatar is. Apart from the well-known argument that the plot closely mirrors Poul Anderson's novella 'Call me Joe', there is also a lot of Anne McCaffrey's dragons in it, with the whole business of the telepathic link between rider and animal. Sigourney Weaver reprises her role as Diane Fossey in 'Gorillas in the mist', being irascible and spiky to the humans but all affection and sweetness to the Na'vi. And we begin to see all sorts of parallels with other Cameron films - cryo-sleep, dropships, powered suits and female helicopter pilots wearing sunglasses.

The other 'plagiarism' comment that's been made is one connecting the look of the film to well-known sf artists. Jim Burns and Roger Dean are most mentioned in this context, though Dean only gets quoted because of the floating mountains, and then only by people who think that Roger Dean invented floating mountains. But if you see Avatar and then look at any book of illustrations by Jim Burns, you will see parallels. His tech looks the same, his human characters are pretty much of a type, and even some of his alien fauna and flora look very much like those in Avatar.

(An early scene where the protagonist arrives on Pandora and is rolling in his wheelchair across the base's ramp but has to give way for a giant dumper truck reminded me a lot of the Jim Burns sf-nal posters he did for the Sunday Times in the late 1970s, in terms of the scale involved.)

It will be interesting to see how much stuff ended up on the cutting room floor (apart from the alien sex scenes). There is a comment that appears in the trailer, that the humans are using old-fashioned tech because nothing else works on Pandora; that's missing from the theatrical print. And when the main character is talking to the Na'vi about the humans, he says that 'they have destroyed their world', but all we see of Earth is the main character at his brother's funeral, who is dumped into a cardboard coffin and rolled into a featureless crematorium oven with no ceremony. That's not much to build a picture of a dying earth on, so I wonder if there's more that we've not yet seen.

All I will say is that Cameron says he's wanted to make this film for 40 years. On that basis, he is definitely One Of Us, because this is basically a Gollancz yellow-cover novel translated into real life. If we can pick out all these influences, it's because we've read all those books as well; and all that sf is now leaking from Cameron's fingers and permeating eveything he touches.

Avatar and District 9 are two very differnt films; both have their merits. Avatar is the more spectacular; District 9 is the more science-fictional, and possibly more original. I think I'll watch that again tonight; after seeing it for the first time, I thought it deserved a Hugo, and it'll be interesting to see if I still think that after a second viewing.

The final thing to remember is this: it is now very obviously possible to make a film of any story. Nothing is impossible any more. And that makes this an interesting time to be a fan of sf film. We can only hope that film-makers are going to be up to the challenge.

Is it just me, or is spending $300 million on making a film, and a further $150 million marketing it (like it was ever going to be a flop with that much money behind it) on a film a bit of a waste?

They'll happily spend half a billion dollars on 3 hours of mindless entertainment, but no, say, going back to the Moon. And the latter has more sense of wonder than three dozen Cameron films...

Ah but Ian, if you put your money into a movie, you will see returns relatively quickly. Don't even ask me about Teflon®.

Well, when we were back in the States for Christmas we caught Avatar in 3-D, and then on the flight back to Germany they showed District 9. Even on a four inch screen, District 9 beat Avatar hands down.

Sure, Avatar looked pretty and had some very advanced 3D--I'm hoping that the trend in 3D continues as it's a good way to keep movie theaters in business. But it was basically Ferngully in space. The bad guys, particularly the mercenary leader, were so cartoonish that I wondered if they'd been imported from the G.I. Joe movie, the plot was anvillicious, and some of the underlying messages (white guy is even better at being a native than the natives, women are there to be rewards) are pretty problematic to me.

District 9 has some problems, sure, but it is much more subtle in its messages, isn't afraid to make an alien the smartest guy in the film, and makes American audiences realize that we're not the only ones with stories to tell.

If someone writes a movie that is simply a retelling of a Shakespeare story in the present, we applaud it.

If someone writes a movie that is simply a retelling of Dances with Wolves/Pocahontas/Ferngully/Various SF Stories set in space in the future, people come out of the wordwork to say how that's such a terrible thing.

Just a thought. ;)

Hey, Shakespeare was simply retelling older stories for most of his plays, too. He just improved on the source material. That's all I'm asking for, too. ;)

Did anyone think Larry Niven's ""Integral Trees" with Avatar?

My initial reaction when watching District 9 was "what the h is this?" but that thought fell away and I ended up rather amazed.

19> Interesting you should mention that. It's been a decade since I read The Integral Trees (or the sequel, The Smoke Ring) and I didn't see the link. But my mother-in-law who had just finished reading my copy of IT specifically mentioned it when we saw the movie yesterday. So it's not just you.

18> Avatar is an improvement on Dances with Wolves. No Kevin Costner.

Avatar and District 9 are both up for multiple Oscars {of course!}.

Here at LT we have saved; countless hours of deliberation, gallons & pounds of libations and various perception enhancing dietary supplements, for the judges making those heady decisions by hashing out the critical issues beforehand.

I did not know films were eligible for the Hugo as Robert Day suggests, that should be an interesting choice this year.

Found the list for Oscars and thought I would post them.

District 9 has nominations for Best Picture, Editing, Visual
Effects, and Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Picture, Best Original Score, Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography,
Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, Best Director and
Art Direction are the Oscar nominations for Avatar.

> 22; I was merely hoping that District 9 got a Hugo in whichever year it turned out to be eligible...

In terms of Oscar nominations, I would hope that "District 9" at least earns "Best Adapted Screenplay", the only award in which it is not competing against "Avatar". I don't really see it winning any of the other awards it has been nominated for, particularly when compared to Avatar.

In contrast, I can well see Avatar walking away with a huge bundle of awards, particularly in terms of presentation and special effects.

I still think that "District 9" was better, though.

After seeing that Hellboy 2 successfully got a Hugo nomination, I think a bit less of the process...

A bit late to the discussion, but:

I loved both of them. But I was surprised by how similar they were. They're both about a guy becoming the Other, learning about an alien culture from the inside. District 9 is personal and Avatar is epic.

I liked District 9 more. It didn't take nearly as long to watch or nearly as much money to make. The style was different (after my father saw it, he sat there for a minute and said "Well, I've never seen a movie like that before...") and it will bear a lot more rewatchings than Avatar because it was more densely written and more focused on the details and characterization than the pretty colors and lights.

Avatar was epic though. Normal guy goes to the promised land and becomes a king. That story just doesn't get old. I think they could have cut out an hour or so of it and come up with a better movie, but it was still cool as it was.

Having seen both, Ffortuna sums it up well for me. I will say that the Avatar visuals were amazing in 3D; almost like a theme park ride. That part was ground-breaking, and made up for the simplistic story.

It must have been a friend of #27 FFortuna who was sitting behind me in the theater muttering "Kafka", "Kafka"! while I was watching District 9. I saw some similarities between the flick and The Metamorphosis by Kafka, both main characters were insectoid in their behaviors before their mutations. I think it was only a homage with a touch of pecuniary motivation that prompted part of the resemblance however.

Fearing a cold drink {or with the price of drinks these days a cup of leftover ice} dropped "accidentally" down my back I graciously withheld my literary correction of my fellow movie goer sparing him an ignominious exit while the theater was still dark with the first credits rolling, hiding the shame of his over reaching interpretative efforts. ;-)

(Nose in air.) No friend of mine would ever dare SPEAK during a movie. Hmph. ;)

District 9 was hands down the better SF movie, imo.

We saw Avatar in 3-D in the theatre over Valentine's Day and while technically impressive and visually stunning, the story is amazingly out of date. My husband immediately recognized the plot of Princess of Mars and couldn't wait to get home to check it out (sure enough, in an interview Cameron credits the books and "other" SF novels he has read). It had an ok "green" message (although a little too kumbaya for me), and any "message" that might have been suggested by making the protagonist a paraplegic really didn't materialize (or failed).

To sum, we were both delighted and disgusted with the movie.

And while District 9 has a similar plot, it leaves one much more thoughtful than did Avatar. I thought they did a great job making those aliens seem real and so there (or should I say, "here"). I enjoyed the faux-documentary style also, but I suppose I could have lived without the splatter in the fire fight. Speaking of which, is it obvious in that firefight that the filmmakers were working on a (canceled) Halo film prior to starting D9?

>27 FFortuna: white guy becomes other and saves their world. imo, that story has gotten real old.

So, what do you all think... a District 10?

31, Firstly, there's no proof that anyone except Christopher and his son were actually saved in District 9. That movie's more about the desire to save them, which might be an old story, but if it is it hasn't sunk in yet. What I was trying to get at in relation to Avatar was less about him automatically being better than all the natives (which goes against the rest of the movie which was ranting about how much better the natives are than anyone else... argh, make up your mind, movie) but more about him being basically a nobody and becoming a somebody. That is an old plot, and can be done badly, but it doesn't get old. At least for me, you are of course entitled to your opinion, and since the plot aspects of Avatar were its weakest, I certainly understand.

Yes, there should be a District 10! I'd rather it was more of an oblique, same-universe story than a direct sequel though. Pick where the most important stuff would be going on next and tell that story. It might be more about Christopher, for instance, or some other character we don't know.

Ack!! I just realized no one has mentioned Star Trek- The future
begins., a great flick this year IMOHO {and just won best make up at the academy
awards} . I liked the flick a lot but did not think it would be a
heavy hitter at award ceremonies as Avatar & District 9. Maybe a case
of familiarity breeding not contempt but complacency? I saw a clip
where the director admitted using similar action techniques as in the last two
Star Wars flicks - it was a bit obvious of course but nice admission and the sky
diving stunts were great.

I guess Avatar did not do it for me - I am getting tired of looking at military types who look like they have been set into gung-ho action, as straight caricatures from the usual 'nam movies. In this, District 9 was more realistic, as set into a refugees camp, in what would normally happen with such creatures, and how they were assessed in terms of their level of technology and danger, etc.

>33 DugsBooks: I think more the case of the familiar vs the new kids on the block. I thought Star Trek was fun; and was certainly great on a sentimental level (having followed it since the 60s), but that's about it.

>34 soniaandree: I'm sorry that District 9 did not win any awards at the Oscars. Perhaps it will win a Hugo (though I suspect the sentimental choice - Star Trek - will win that one). One only has to know a little about the history of Soweto, the district where District 9 was filmed, to appreciate some of the real roots that story comes out of. Of course, it has applications to general themes of racism, immigration...etc no matter where they occur in the world, as has been already mentioned on this thread.

>34 soniaandree: btw, the arrogant, super-macho "Rambo" types are very much a part of gaming, are they not? I see the influence of gaming in both of these movies.

>31 avaland: and that's true, we don't know if anyone other than the two aliens were saved. Certainly, our protagonist was last seen - completely transformed into alien form - very much still on Earth. Intriguing, don't you think? Will the aliens come back and treat 'us' like they have been treated? Are the aliens remaining on Earth being treated better or worse since these events? I like it when a movie leaves me thinking.

#35

I would hope that Hugo nominees would remember how Abrams used and abused their favourite SF property, a bastardisation of one of their favourite SF franchises.

"Star Trek XI" was monumentally dumb. Its bar was set so low, sea cucumbers could have followed it.

Having said that, I recently watched "A Sound of Thunder", and that might actually be dumber...

>37 iansales: hm. I see nothing science fictional about sea cucumbers;-) (of course, perhaps you meant alien sea cucumbers or possibly some sort of future technological artificial libertarian sea cucumbers)

Some people might think "libertarian sea cucumbers" is a tautology :-)

Ayn Rand: Alan, Is that a sea cucumber in your pants?

Greenspan: No, I'm just happy to see you!

Speaking of awful SF...

It's pretty significant that Avatar received Oscar nominations for anything you might think of that's remotely applicable, except anything to do with the script.

42, And only won things related to effects and cinematography, if I'm not mistaken.

While I realize that special effects and SF movies are often synonymous, and while I really enjoyed the new technology in and visual design of Avatar, give me a thoughtful, Gattaca-type movie any day...

trivia buffs: has any SF movie won for best original or adapted screenplay? (just curious)

>40 justifiedsinner: LOL!

>44 avaland: - no SF film has won in a writing category but that's no great surprise. Genre has never done that well at the Oscars - see also the failure of Westerns and Comedies to win much as well.

though there's Lord of the Rings and Ghost, on the fantasy side

The world of Avatar was infinitely more appealing to me. It felt like the movie was designed to become a video-game. I'm not a devotee of RPG's but I can imagine the attraction.

The world of District 9 is not designed to be appealing, but rather appalling. It succeeds. Because it is set in South Africa, it is a movie I would use to get college students thinking. To be honest, I'm not sure either story was extremely deep. Both have subtexts about current global political issues. Avatar is better at creating a dreamworld. District 9 is better in the shock/horror/shootemup/gritty reality mode. Both, IMHO are legitimate SF streams. I just happen to enjoy the dreamworld stream much more.

Star Trek -- well, the Star Trek world has been part of my mental furniture for a long time. It was a worthy and legitimate addition to that canon. No more, but also no less. I enjoyed it, except when being too close to the fight scenes made my head spin.

District 9 had all sorts of interesting, subversive things going on. The central scenario of aliens living in a slum and fighting over cat food nicely inverts the usual 'We come in peace' with superior wisdom/weapons scenario.

You could fall asleep about 10 minutes into Avatar and wake up at the end able to guess the outcome of the cliched 'plot'.

I would love to see a film combining the computer graphics generation in Avatar with really off the wall, trailblazing plot/SF concepts. I would guess though that film industry economics will force expensive fillms down well-proven audience-drawing routes.

District 9 was much better in my opinion, it had depth. I didn't realize it, but the protaganists in the movie, the anthropologist actually display a lack of knowledge of anthropology from the crew. The book called 'The Na'vi' is actually a faux pas, naming a book like that is like saying: this is everything you need to know about these people. My anthropology teacher actually had a lot more to say on the issue. The movie's only good scene is the ending, really. The rest is interesting, but the plotis really simple and predictable from the commercials, and people act like it's fucking gold.

District 9 has a good plot. That sentence is, in my mind, enough reason as to why it is better than avatar.

The great big mystery about District 9 is this: how did a dork like Wickes van der Merwe get to marry the boss's daughter? (Not only that: a boss's daughter who could not have been short of suitors, either.)

50, Well, he obviously adores her (hard to resist adoration), and when he's dirtied up a little bit pretty hot. It could also have been his family (I can't remember what social status they were implied to have) or something like that.

#50

If science fiction has taught us nothing - and it has - it is that hot women like nerds and geeks.

>52 rojse: oh, I thought it was Woody Allen films that taught us that:-)

Avatar can be summed up with two ideas underlying: "Nature gooood, hooomans baaaad" and "Market-oriented research baddddd, cultural studies gooooood." Toss in a love story, bake at 350, and try not to gag.

I really wanted to love District 9. However, the author's pet themes (colonialism, racism, apartheid, corporate power, etc) depend on completely unrealistic assumptions in the film, which kind of ruined it for me.

1. Every government, military, intelligence agency, research university, defense contractor, etc, in the world has decided, yeah, we'll let South Africa be the custodians of the most revolutionary technology the world has ever seen. This allows the aliens to be easily isolated and ghettoized.

2. There's a huge black market for alien technology, but apparently only one small-time gangster has access to it, so he can get away with trading a few cans of cat food for even the coolest alien weaponry. This allows the aliens to be "exploited" by letting us steal their "resources" for a pittance, a major theme with former colonial countries.

There's more, but this is already enough -- if either of those far-fetched points were removed, the entire film would collapse. The aliens would no longer be scraping by for a living in a ghetto and you wouldn't have "bad cops" going around shooting them and criminals exploiting them with food trade. The movie would have no remaining plot.

Ah, but.... the huge black market in the alien technology is only of limited interest to the rest of the world because up until the events of the film, no-one has been able to get the alien tech to work because it's all signatured. Whileever no humans can use the alien tech, it remains of limited interest to the rapacious capitalists.

The Nigerian gangsta thinks he can get a lead on everyone else because he applies African concepts of absorbing the power of defeated enemies to his attempts to access the alien tech (i.e. eating alien flesh). The fact that it doesn't work like that doesn't stop him keeping on trying just in case.

This suggests plot lines for subsequent films, of course. The only trouble is that by the time you get to South Africa v. Rest of the world for the alien tech (around the third film by my counting), it would stand a terrible risk of becoming just a shoot-up fest set in Cape Town.

#54 I just watched Avatar for the second time, a $1 redbox version, and I still liked it. Very engrossing even without the 3-D. Some simple themes well thought out and executed in my opinion. From actual practice perhaps just a typical tale of corporate ethics when there is no one to look over their shoulder. I read that in the sequel an explanation of the alien's and human's similarities is explained.

I actually winced a bit at the start of District 9 for the reasons you mention but quickly overcame that as the flick unwound {special effects were spectacularly convincing}. Keeping the aliens so isolated would be nigh impossible unless they landed in N. Korea maybe?- but wrangling an explicit and plausible explanation would have been boring narration and taken away from the styled used for the film perhaps.

I think it is just a "given" in the film's argument that you are asked to accept. {or insert a foreign expression for that film technique here , preferably french- one that would light up a mini skirted coffee sipping belle's face with delight }. The isolation of the aliens did help with the themes of the movie, highlighting problems in Africa "colonialism, racism, apartheid, corporate power, etc" Were I in the movie I would be waiting outside the gates with a tractor trailer full of cat food however ;-)

Haha, maybe I was too hard on Avatar. I suppose if you buy the idea of corporations being inherently evil then the plot is at least plausible. Maybe I'm not being fair to the plot's quality from that perspective.

I also loved the special effects in District 9. I thought they were way better than Avatar's. The weapons were awesome.

One thing about District 9 I didn't mention was the dangerousness of the analogy to apartheid, colonialism, and so on.

In the movie, the aliens really are dumb, and they really are a different species than us. People used those arguments to justify apartheid, but of course the arguments were false. Here the arguments are true! There are also additional arguments like, they possess incredibly superior technology and weaponry and pose a real threat to us. Maybe we *should* isolate them, maybe we *should* take advantage of their temporary weakness due to running out of fuel.

Also, within the alien species itself there is some type of racism or apartheid, namely the smart, minority "pilot race" and the stupid, majority "galley race". The pilot's kid is smart and inventive and becomes a pilot. The galley aliens are uniformly dumb and brutish.

It's almost like the message of the movie was that the apartheid is not necessarily bad. I thought about that for a while but never resolved it. Any ideas? Am I way off base?

The way I saw it was that the view of the aliens as dumb, hive creatures without any ability, warmth or emotional ties was down to human prejudice. A lot of the additional material on the DVD included stuff like "educational films" about the alien life cycle and the often-repeated story about how the aliens leave their eggs and their young to fend for themselves; whereas this should be contrasted with the behaviour of the hero alien towards his son and his fellow aliens (though how much of this was acquired behaviour and how much was the film-makers anthropomorphising the hero alien I'm unsure). At best, I think the jury's out as to whether there are two castes of aliens. After all, we're only seeing the bulk of them at their lowest ebb, operating in just survival mode.

That's definitely possible, but I feel like the film went out of its way to show us the difference between the pilot's family and the others. Other aliens didn't even show a trace of intelligence, whereas the pilot was pretty obviously intelligent even while in hiding, before we saw the secret lab. I didn't see any supplemental material on the DVD so I'm just judging based on the actual movie.

If they were all that smart, I have to ask -- how did they end up living in a ghetto? They have superior weaponry, and if we assume a similar or greater level of intelligence, then it just doesn't make sense. So to me it's reasonable to assume that most of the aliens really are dumb and serve pretty low-level functions on the ship. The plot gives absolutely no hint or justification that they are hiding their intelligence and they are secretly all as smart as the pilot's family.

Point taken, but you would assume that the crew of an airliner were (generally) smarter than the passengers. I suppose you could work on the premise that the human assumption about the general level of alien intelligence would be based on the majority findings. But it still wouldn't excuse the human assumptive leap about familial relationships based on biology. There are plenty of examples where we've made assumptions about the parental relationships of terrestrial creatures that lay eggs that have turned out to be wrong.

As for the weaponry; we aren't told whether the weapons were confiscated personal property, ship's complement or cargo. Perhaps there's a caste thing about soldiering, or a religious thing, or perhaps even the alien military, like ours, shudders at the thought of the uneducated and untrained masses being given access to sophisticated kit (which is why conscription is unlikely ever to make a comeback. But I digress...).

Honestly, take any cross-section of humans, starve them, leave them in squalor, and then confine them with limited resource and (implied) drug addiction, and where are you? "All those humans are vicious and stupid." The ones that weren't brutal were less likely to survive, and when you're living hand-to-mouth you don't have much chance to show off how smart you are.

59, they looked barely alive when the humans broke in. The humans could pretty much do whatever they wanted. In that kind of condition, too, they weren't very organized, so even having the more advanced weapons (before most of them were taken away,) they didn't have any way to AVOID being put in the ghetto if that's where the humans wanted to put them.

Also, re message 57: You don't have to believe all corporations are evil, although that might have been the message. You just have to believe THAT one is.