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Cairnius wrote:

Cane wrote:
If the aliens do come back and humanity bites it from sub-orbital bombardment, it may be a case of the majority of the species ruining it for the minority, but as a species humanity, in that fictional universe, deserves it.

Why? Thats stupid. You're thinking in terms of philosophy and morality. No species survives because of the niceness of another species. They survive or they don't based on their own merits. Indeed, if humanity were intelligent it would have immediately subsumed all their technology and then wiped them out. We don't tolerate other sentient species' competing with our resources, thats why we've survived.

Had the prawns landed on planet of the apes they'd be slaves
Had the prawns landed on planet of the ants they'd have been eaten.
if they'd landed over the ocean they'd have been dead.

Because humanity interfered and tried to help them humanity is now doomed.
Now they are a threat. Now our world is known to the prawns. And they will be coming.

Fix the coding on your last post, Frazz. I can decipher it, though.


What's stupid is your calling "thinking about morality and philosphy" stupid when clearly the film is meant to inspire precisely this level of thinking. District 9 wasn't some stupid typical summer blockbuster sci-fi film...I don't want to automatically assume, based on this one comment of yours, that the film flew way, way over your head but that wouldn't be too high a leap for me to make right now.

Let's try and prove that hypothesis wrong with some intelligent conversation...


Don't you think, in that fictional universe, that if humanity could have figured out the prawns' technology without the prawns, and if there were no human rights groups monitoring their status and making a stink about it, that the prawns WOULD have been summarily executed? Look at how they were getting treated in the film as it is!

The aliens were clearly intelligent - they were capable of language. Think about that for a moment. Human beings are the ONLY form of life on Earth which we KNOW has language. Maybe dolphins have some form of it, maybe whales, we don't know - but language is considered one of those markers of sentience that designate a higher life form. The prawns' language could be understood by humans, and the humans' language could be understood by prawns.

That from the moment humans realized this and STILL forced the prawns to live in shacks, humanity showed its colors. It's no less right to do to aliens than it is to do to other humans...and yes, of course this comes down to morality. Either you think that humans deserve to be treated well by other humans or you don't. Either you believe that if humanity has the means to provide just the fething basics to everyone, just a roof over their heads, some clothes on their backs, running water, plumbing, and the means to earn at least a living wage, or you don't believe that and it's "every man for himself."

I might argue that the only way you can buy into "every man for himself" is if you don't think everyone else around you is actually also human just like you, because damned straight anyone reading this thread if they found themselves destitute, homeless, hungry and naked would expect someone to help them if they could...and why would you expect them to help you?

Because you're human, you're a person, not just some homeless dog wandering the streets, you're a person. That makes you "special," right?


Humanity didn't try to help the prawns - that's what you're missing. The prawns were a nuisance and everything humanity did they did for their own selfish interests.

1) They cut the ship open not to "rescue the poor stranded aliens inside" but to see what the hell was going on in there. They didn't know there were any aliens who needed help. This was pure human curiosity.

2) When they found the aliens, they didn't seem to have engaged in any kind of serious study, didn't try to figure out the alien society and how it worked...they wrote them off as "stupid worker drones," probably because they looked insectoid, and that was that. They didn't move them into D9 to help them, they moved them into D9 because the prawns were being a nuisance. Like bugs.

3) Look at Wikus. Do you know the most confusing moment in that film? It's when Wikus turns around to help Christopher get to the commmand module.

Wikus has no children, so he cannot associate with Christopher's desire to be with his child. Hell, go back to that scene where Wikus the Idiot was happily burning prawn eggs, murdering infants for all intents and purposes.

Wikus only helped Christopher storm the MNU compound in order to get the fuel for the command module to get himself up to the medical equipment on the mothership. The SECOND Wikus realized that he wasn't going to get immediate help he turned on Christopher, and tried to fly the command module himself like an imbecile.

All Wikus cared about was getting back to his wife, was not being a medical experiment. He didn't really care about the prawns. He was an idiot corporate functionary.

So why did he turn around to help Christopher at the end? That's the only moment of the film I don't buy. Wikus is no hero, he's a coward. He has no conscience, he's not a thoughtful guy, he's an idiot. Was he just pissed off and throwing a human tantrum, just wanting to murder people by that point? Did he realize just how fethed he was, and a three-year wait was better than no hope at all?

Wikus certainly wasn't "helping" Christopher, he was helping himself. Likewise, humanity wasn't "helping" the prawns, it did the barest minimum it had do. D10 was just a concentration camp, like Wikus said. By issuing that statement, Wikus made it clear that he knew what was going on, he just didn't care because he'd never bothered to try and find out whether the prawns were truly intelligent or not. He was just another ignorant human.


Remember the shots of crowds of people cheering as the prawn's ship was leaving the atmosphere? Remember all the interview footage of people complaining about the prawns and wanting them gone?

I laughed at those shots of the crowds bouncing and dancing and cheering as the ship left...they were ignorant as to how the prawns were getting treated and so didn't realize it, but now Christopher knows what was going on. Those cheering humans were probably cheering their own impending doom, and that's hilarious.


There are good, honest, thoughtful, moral people in the world. I personally believe that to be a "good" person one has to learn how to be introspective, how to think philosophically...one has to learn empathy and how to project themselves into someone else's shoes which really only truly comes from suffering and experience coupled with having the kind of emotional support system (friends and family) which allows one to suffer and then recover from that suffering in the company and support of those friends and family...

We're all born animals, just another animal species on this planet, and we BECOME "human" in the moral sense. We learn and we grow, if we're lucky enough to get the opportunity...look up "Piaget" and "Manslow" and "hierarchy of needs." You cannot develop the upper spheres of human experience, i.e. morality and thought, unless your lower, physical spheres are taken care of (food, shelter, companionship, etc.).

Ideally it's the responsibility of those of us who get to truly evolve into our humanity and who control the resources of our species to make sure this opportunity gets extended to everyone else. This small, lucky minority has the responsibility to make sure their circumstances get recreated such that the experience of this minority is no longer "special," but is "normal" for everyone. That's pretty much the central thesis of every religious and spiritual tradition ever developed by humanity.

However, this is when morality comes into play. Of this small percentage of people who get an education, have lots of food, access to information and the freedom to use it, some of them are what could fairly be called "good people" who want to help others. Unfortunately, part of being "good" is usually a certain lack of avarice or power-hungriness. So good people often never seize hold of the levels of power.

This is the chief failing of being "good." Sometimes you DO have to "do evil" in order to "do good." Deposing a dictatorial regime, for instance...it's going to involve killing and violence most likely. Killing and violence are not "good." They're not necessarily "bad" if it's justified, and it can be, but it's certainly not "good" so "good" people won't engage in killing or violence, and thus neuter themselves in the face of "evil" people who are quite willing to kill and use violence.

Some of this small percentage of people are "evil," just look out for themselves, are "othered" to everyone else, and therefore feel justified in whatever they do. I would hold Dick Cheney up as one of the most evil human beings alive today. He has no remorse for engineering a war in Iraq that murdered a hundred thousand civilians when he knew damned well there was no justification for the war involving national security. He wanted to score his Halliburton buddies some no-bid contracts and to project American military force into an oil-rich nation and a region which would be of strategic interest to the United States, i.e. the economic interests of the class of Americans to which he belongs and represents.

I doubt Dick Cheney has shed one tear for the thousands of dead American soldiers whose blood is squarely on his hands, and the thousands more wives and children whose lives he ruined.

People like Dick Cheney ARE willing to do whatever it takes to seize the levers of power, and so "evil" people, a minority, take over while "good" people, another minority, sit back and do nothing but complain, and everyone else, the majority of humanity who don't have access to real power (other than once in a great while engaging in the mentality of the mob and toppling governments and creating a temporary power vacuum) all get screwed in the process.

So an evil minority of humans, the MNU, treat the prawns like animals, get caught doing it by Christopher, and now if he calls down the rain of fire on the planet Earth this tiny minority of the species is responsible for the death of everyone, if that's how it goes down. The "good" minority of humans, the human rights groups, are impotent to do anything other than bitch about how the MNU functions, and so perhaps they're just as responsible? Not sure what else they really could have done short of taking up arms against the MNU and trying to "free" the prawns, but crusty hippies don't do that sort of thing. *grin*


Anyway...if humanity had truly helped the prawns, learned to communicate with them, figured out how their society worked, given them some space to recreate it temporarily, do you think maybe Christopher would have come forward? If he didn't have all the evidence in the world all around him that whatever technical information he gave humanity would have been subject to abuse and that rather than getting help in getting home he would have been grabbed out of D9, that Christopher MIGHT have come forward, humanity could have helped him fix the mothership, and then the humans wouldn't HAVE to create a D9, or D10, to house all these stranded aliens?

And when the aliens finally got off the planet, it would have been with gratitude and maybe even the possibility for future, peaceful relations, rather than it being a close-call escape mostly likely followed by a return in force?

The humanity in D9 dug its own grave, and deserves what it gets. They fethed with a species more intelligent than they were, and with technology they couldn't even begin to comprehend. There's a word for that:

Stupid.

You have way too much time on your hands...

Feh, I see you posting online here all the time. You have as much or more free time as I do...and you mod on here, so you might actually have MORE free time than I. My wife mods, I see how long she's in front of the computer every day...

When you type 105 wpm on average, if not faster, and have been reading philosophy since you were in your early 20's, AND went to an arty film program even though you only wanted to make sci-fi films but had to watch fething Fellini and crap for four years, typing out a post like that is actually pretty rudimentary.

You're still equating good and evil. Nonsense. The fact you can't see I'm not talking about the morality of the film and the questions it raises, but about about the statement humans "deserve" to get zapped reveals much. But please, return to your diatribe about me not "getting things," because you'd prefer to throw snide comments my way without addressing the actual discussion.

Had prawns landed anywhere they would have been slaughtered or eventually conquered. In the film humanity made the absolute mistake of keeping them alive. The morality of how humanity treated them is irrelevant in a true Darwinist construct. Again:

*Had they landed on Klendathu they would have been wiped out.

*Had they landed on a planet inhabited by Alien they would have been wiped out.

*Had they landed on planet inhabited by intelligent ants they would have been wiped out.

*Had they landed on the African Savannah they would have been wiped out.

*Had they landed in the time of the dinosaurs they would have been wiped out.

*Had humanity not forced open the hatch and saved them from starvation they would have been wiped out.

We know not of this good and evil you speak of... SPIT ON HIM!!!

Considering the snide comments you liberally (pun intended) dish out on a regular basis, you sort of lose any moral standing to complain about mine, Frazzled. Those who live in glass houses...

So, tell me, when you say "Had prawns landed anywhere they would have been slaughtered or eventually conquered," are you professing knowledge of other alien species in the universe with whom you are intimately acquainted such that you can say with certainty that ONLY humanity would have kept them alive?

Again, D9 is not a stupid summer blockbuster. Discussions of Klendathu or Aliens are beneath this film. It's a metaphor for the real world, not an entirely fantastic exercise in F/X.


I don't think that there's any "equating" which needs to be done when considering the morality of burning infants alive and murdering sentient beings just for fun. That's what some of the humans did to the prawns. The rest of the humans either did nothing to step in and improve the prawns' situation but just bitched ineffectually about it (human rights groups) or just didn't care one way or another (the majority of people on the planet).

All Christopher knows is that 9 million of his people are trapped on Earth where they are being cut up into bits and summarily executed for not wanting to be moved from shantytown to concentration camp. It's not his problem how this came to be, it is what it is...and so he'd be perfectly justified, from his perspective, to come back and just wipe humanity out. It demonstrated itself to Christopher as a clear threat to his own species' survival, say if humans ever built their own spaceships and went out into the void and found Christopher's people.


True Darwinism has nothing to do with this. You're not making a sound argument...Darwinism is about how species evolve in the wild through natural selection. Nothing to do with aliens crashing on a planet. The prawns and the humans aren't two species of life which evolved on the same world through natural selection and which were then in competition for survival as species. They'd have to be for Darwinism to be appropriate to this conversation.

If you want to talk about some kind of "social Darwinism," then you could say that humanity's maltreatment of the prawns demonstrated humanity's lack of social evolution in terms of being able to interact with greater stellar society. The humans were primitive and stupid...so social Darwinism dictates that they be rendered extinct, because they were too stupid to adapt to an expanded view of the universe which included other forms of sentient life equal to but different than their own.

You just don't like the negative light that D9 casts on humanity because you don't like the light it shines on you as a result. Good movies do that sort of thing.


The mistake humanity made in the film was not keeping the prawns alive - it was not treating them like human beings, which is what they should have done, and that's precisely the point of the film and the moral of the story. Humans don't treat other human like humans. We treat them like aliens. It's just the same parable of "man's inhumanity to man" that we've been learning about since high school in one form or another...

Wrexasaur wrote:We know not of this good and evil you speak of... SPIT ON HIM!!!

I for one welome our new camel overlords, and look forward to siding with the right thinking Camel Of JUDGMENT!

I wonder how the reaction would be different if an explorer party of humans crashed on a alien planet and were mistreated by the faction governing the human camps, but helped by at least one of the aliens. And supported, passively, by many more.

Somehow I find it hard to believe the people calling out for humanity's extinction would be calling out for the extinction of the entire alien race by our hand should the situations have been reversed.

Cairnius wrote:
True Darwinism has nothing to do with this. You're not making a sound argument...Darwinism is about how species evolve in the wild through natural selection. Nothing to do with aliens crashing on a planet.

That's wrong. There is no reasonable case for natural selection to stop at the edge of the atmosphere. Just as there is no reasonable case to differentiate between the natural, and the artificial. Humans, and therefore al human activity, are part of nature.

Cairnius wrote:
The prawns and the humans aren't two species of life which evolved on the same world through natural selection and which were then in competition for survival as species. They'd have to be for Darwinism to be appropriate to this conversation.

Again, you're failing to appreciate the real implications of Darwinism. If natural selection is indeed a real process, then it applies universally; without regard to the development level of any given species.

Cairnius wrote:
If you want to talk about some kind of "social Darwinism," then you could say that humanity's maltreatment of the prawns demonstrated humanity's lack of social evolution in terms of being able to interact with greater stellar society. The humans were primitive and stupid...so social Darwinism dictates that they be rendered extinct, because they were too stupid to adapt to an expanded view of the universe which included other forms of sentient life equal to but different than their own.

This argument could also be applied to Fraz's comments with regard to the assimilation of alien technology, and the elimination of their presence. You're falling into the trap of assuming that kindness, and tolerance are empirically superior virtues in all cases.

just thought I'd interrupt this all too serious debate for a minute...

Did anyone else wonder why they didn't try to send a missile at the command module while it was being pulled up to the mothership? the main bad guy tried to shoot it himself when he could have just radioed missile death on it.

Okay back to angry debate.

ROUND 2... FIGHT!

No, I also wondered that. They had three more missiles on that launcher.

Maybe they were afraid of hitting the mothership or something? No idea.

Orkeosaurus wrote:I wonder how the reaction would be different if an explorer party of humans crashed on a alien planet and were mistreated by the faction governing the human camps, but helped by at least one of the aliens. And supported, passively, by many more.

Somehow I find it hard to believe the people calling out for humanity's extinction would be calling out for the extinction of the entire alien race by our hand should the situations have been reversed.

Are you kidding me?

8 million humans crash on an alien planet. The aliens stick us all into a shantytown. No electricity, no running water, very little food. They kill us whenever we "act up" or try to defend ourselves against groups of them coming into our shantytown and pushing us around. The only aliens we ever see are the ones doing this sort of thing, as we have no communication with the rest of the alien world.

One day, one of the aliens comes stumbling into the shantytown and runs into the Captain of the crashed human spacecraft. The alien discovers the Captain's escape plan, and asks if he can come along because he needs something off the Captain's human spaceship. The Captain says no one is going anywhere because this stupid alien stole the fuel for the spaceship. The alien says he'll help the Captain get the fuel back.

While blasting the beejeezus out of aliens with "helper alien" the Captain discovers a basement filled with human bodies and entrails and other disgusting examples of humans being experimented on like lab rats.

Captain and "helper alien" return to the shantytown. Captain tells "helper alien" that he's going to have to wait three years to get his help, as Captain needs to go get help for the rest of the humans. "Helper alien" smacks him in the skull and knocks him out.

The Captain wakes up to find out that his ship and his son are gone, and gets thrown into the back of an alien paddywagon.

The Captain escapes from the paddywagon to get led back to his crashed-up escape vehicle by the "helper alien" who suddenly agrees to be helpful again. Captain is reunited with his son, they get onto the human spaceship and leave.


The Captain shows up here on Earth to tell us the story of these awful aliens who put 8 million humans in shantytowns, killed us like bugs, did medical experiments on us, and we only escaped because one crazy alien wanted something from us.

You find it hard to believe that humanity wouldn't be calling for glassing the aliens' planet if humanity had the ability to do so?

Are you kidding me???

You don't know humans very well...it would make the American reaction to 9/11 look like a bout of mild annoyance by comparison...

Cairnius wrote:

You find it hard to believe that humanity wouldn't be calling for glassing the aliens' planet if humanity had the ability to do so?

Are you kidding me???

Orkeosaurus wrote:
Somehow I find it hard to believe the people calling out for humanity's extinction would be calling out for the extinction of the entire alien race by our hand should the situations have been reversed.

That doesn't look like an indictment of humanity as a whole.

Correct, I should clarify; I wasn't talking about humanity in the hypothetical scenario, I was talking about the audience of the hypothetical film. Particularly, the audience of the film that thought all humans deserved to perish for what they did to the aliens. And, I should probably have said "some of the people", I may have overgeneralized there a bit.

Also, your summary didn't include the helper alien saving the human captain at the end, or the human crew of the ship frequently starting fights with the native alien population, or the helper alien expressing sympathy for the humans over the experiments done by the alien government/security forces (Christopher seemed adequately knowledgeable regarding the mercenaries; he knew enough about the legal papers they were trying to get him to sign anyways).

Wikus wasn't a great guy, but he wasn't a monster.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Correct, I should clarify; I wasn't talking about humanity in the hypothetical scenario, I was talking about the audience of the hypothetical film. Particularly, the audience of the film that thought all humans deserved to perish for what they did to the aliens. And, I should probably have said "some of the people", I may have overgeneralized there a bit.

Also, your summary didn't include the helper alien saving the human captain at the end, or the human crew of the ship frequently starting fights with the native alien population, or the helper alien expressing sympathy for the humans over the experiments done by the alien government/security forces

So, your question was "Would the human audience of the movie about the humans crashing on the alien planet and then getting experimented on and killed like bugs and the human Captain escaping finally on a sense of whim from one crazy alien think that the aliens in the movie deserved to get exterminated?"

The answer, again, is yes. Absolutely. In fact, the audience would clamor for such a sequel if they thought it was possible. People love revenge pictures.


No, I said that the helper alien saved the human Captain at the end, but I phrased it from how the human Captain would have seen it, and I quote myself:

"The Captain escapes from the paddywagon to get led back to his crashed-up escape vehicle by the "helper alien" who suddenly agrees to be helpful again."


You're right, I didn't talk about the human crew of the ship starting fights with the native alien population, but we don't know why the prawns in the movie started fights with the South Africans. We have no idea, as a matter of fact. There are circumstances under which those fights would have been justified, and some where they would not have been. There are a lot of different reasons why people fight with one another.

If you want to look to Neil Blomkamp's rl experience growing up Johannesburg, then I would argue that had he gone into the reasons why the aliens "started fights," it would have been sympathetic with, not indicting of, the aliens...but in any case that got left out for a reason, and there's why.


I would question whether Wikus really felt sorry about the experiments on the prawns when he was protesting to Christopher that he didn't know the experiments were going on, or whether he was covering his own ass just to make sure Christopher didn't get upset with him and refuse to help him return to being purely human. I judge Wikus by his actions, not his words, and his actions were decidedly selfish throughout the entire film with the solitary exception of turning around to escort Christopher back to the command module at the end of the film - and like I've said, there's not nearly enough exploration as to Wikus' motivation in that moment. I can't take that single act as being truly "selfless" when there are several other and just as reasonable explanations as to why he did what he did.

I actually thought the execution of that moment was the weakest part of the whole film.

Cairnius wrote:So, your question was "Would the human audience of the movie about the humans crashing on the alien planet and then getting experimented on and killed like bugs and the human Captain escaping finally on a sense of whim from one crazy alien think that the aliens in the movie deserved to get exterminated?"

The answer, again, is yes. Absolutely. In fact, the audience would clamor for such a sequel if they thought it was possible. People love revenge pictures.

It wasn't a question of the audience as a whole so much as the part of the audience that feels such sympathy for the prawn as to wish humanity is destroyed.

I don't think the majority of District 9's actual audience thought the human race deserved death for what some of them did.

No, I said that the helper alien saved the human Captain at the end, but I phrased it from how the human Captain would have seen it, and I quote myself:

"The Captain escapes from the paddywagon to get led back to his crashed-up escape vehicle by the "helper alien" who suddenly agrees to be helpful again."

Ah, I was getting the timeline mixed up somehow. Nevermind.

You're right, I didn't talk about the human crew of the ship starting fights with the native alien population, but we don't know why the prawns in the movie started fights with the South Africans. We have no idea, as a matter of fact. There are circumstances under which those fights would have been justified, and some where they would not have been. There are a lot of different reasons why people fight with one another.

If you want to look to Neil Blomkamp's rl experience growing up Johannesburg, then I would argue that had he gone into the reasons why the aliens "started fights," it would have been sympathetic with, not indicting of, the aliens...but in any case that got left out for a reason, and there's why.

The fighting between the prawn and the humans was important to the movie for both parties. You can say "we have no idea whether or not it was justified", but that could just as easily be said of much of the mistreatment of the prawn. The conflicts between the groups in the movie seemed to be both groups getting into fights with each other. Human nature isn't to get into conflicts that could result in their harm for no reason, and there was obviously no malice towards the prawn before humans ever interacted with them.

I would question whether Wikus really felt sorry about the experiments on the prawns when he was protesting to Christopher that he didn't know the experiments were going on, or whether he was covering his own ass just to make sure Christopher didn't get upset with him and refuse to help him return to being purely human. I judge Wikus by his actions, not his words, and his actions were decidedly selfish throughout the entire film with the solitary exception of turning around to escort Christopher back to the command module at the end of the film - and like I've said, there's not nearly enough exploration as to Wikus' motivation in that moment. I can't take that single act as being truly "selfless" when there are several other and just as reasonable explanations as to why he did what he did.

I actually thought the execution of that moment was the weakest part of the whole film.

He protested the shooting of the prawn, when he knew he would be shocked for not cooperating. He seemed pretty surprised by the experiments when he came into the labs. He also tried to minimize needless conflict with the prawn while on patrol, and tried to avoid killing the security personnel when they went back to the labs with the alien weaponry.

Also, saving Christopher at the end was the climax of both the film's plotline and the characterization of Wikus. Disregarding it or minimizing its relevance makes very little sense. It's certainly at least as important as having knocked out Christopher to fly the command module itself, which was a pretty stupid plan anyway; if he had been logically looking out for nothing but his own self-interest he wouldn't have abandoned who was probably he only person capable of fixing his injury (the child was pretty smart, but as far as I can recall he never was shown to have that specific knowledge). He panicked and did something stupid.

Aside from knocking Christopher out, he didn't seem to do anything too terrible. He was put into his position of the form-signing operation's overseer due to his father-in-law, he was mostly operating by procedure during that time which was a far cry from "good" but wasn't particularly "evil". He was pretty cavalier about burning the eggs, but the implications of that action really depends a lot on how developed a prawn in an egg is. Or, perhaps more relevantly, what Wikus was educated on concerning the issue.

He went kind of nuts with the "I'm turning into a prawn!" thing, but that's more a matter of him being quite stupid at times than him being immoral.

@ Cairnius & Orkeosaurus: The 'helper alien' only helped because he was part human. I think humanity would be more than happy to bomb this alien species back into the stone age and make reservations and theme parks for the remainders of their race to live in.



Good, bad, I'm the guy (or prawn) with the gun.

George Spiggott wrote:@ Cairnius & Orkeosaurus: The 'helper alien' only helped because he was part human. I think humanity would be more than happy to bomb this alien species back into the stone age and make reservations and theme parks for the remainders of their race to live in.

I think people overestimate a planet's willingness to go to war with an unknown species. For both scenarios.

"Bomb vast swathes of people" isn't as popular as some people think. It would be like nuking Afganistan for 9/11.

Orkeosaurus wrote:"Bomb vast swathes of people" isn't as popular as some people think. It would be like nuking Afganistan for 9/11.

It would be more akin to nuking the Nazi's for the Holocaust, but even easier because they aren't human. /godwin

I think a lot of it would depend on just how 'alien' our hypothetical aliens are.

Giant amorphous blobs of people-eating goo? Push the button, drop the bombs, and then scorch the ground just for fun.

Vaguely anthropomorphic expressions, linguistic faculties, and and clear emotional displays? Not nearly so easy.

George Spiggott wrote:It would be more akin to nuking the Nazi's for the Holocaust, but even easier because they aren't human. /godwin

It would be nothing like that.

I'd say it would be like nuking all of Europe for the Holocaust, but that would still be more sensible.


Multi-National United was a single corporation, that is not only less than the government of the planet, it's less than the government of the nation the prawn landed in. They were hired by the government of one nation. The population of South Africa is around 1/250 of the world's population, and most of South Africa wasn't involved in the prawn's internment.

I think there were about 2 million prawn in the camps? How many of them died because of their treatment? A fifth, at most?

400,000 compared to about 6,500,000,000 is a hell of a lot of a difference. About the same difference as the number of people killed in 9/11 and the population of Afghanistan. This is ignoring the fact that the prawns were dying before human intervention, and that humans had to sacrifice their own time and effort to prevent them from dying. Maybe they didn't do enough, but before they came into the picture it was death for all of them.

Orkeosaurus wrote:I don't think the majority of District 9's actual audience thought the human race deserved death for what some of them did.

In that fictional universe? I think you may be misjudging the audience for District 9. I think people would look at what the MNU did and think that if the prawns did come back with vengeance in mind, it isn't the prawns job to try and decide which humans are good and which humans are evil. The humans certainly never seemed to look too deeply at the prawns, so why would the prawns follow suit?

All the prawns know is that the humans did what they did...so I think the audience of District 9 would not blame the prawns for coming back and seeking revenge on humanity. It would be quite understandable.

Orkeosaurus wrote:The fighting between the prawn and the humans was important to the movie for both parties. You can say "we have no idea whether or not it was justified", but that could just as easily be said of much of the mistreatment of the prawn. The conflicts between the groups in the movie seemed to be both groups getting into fights with each other. Human nature isn't to get into conflicts that could result in their harm for no reason, and there was obviously no malice towards the prawn before humans ever interacted with them.

Mistreatment of the kind we saw against the prawns is never justified, Orke. Ever. Take the historical analogues in human history that Blomkamp is clearly drawing off of and tell me that there's ever a justification for the way humans were treated by humans in those situations.

Human nature IS to get into conflicts that could result in their harm for no reason - they do it for emotion. They don't think, they feel and they act. Anger and vegeance alone account for how much violence in the world? These are not "reasoned action," they're emotional reaction.

In the end, the best we can say is that we don't know why the prawns and the humans were fighting prior to the prawns being moved into District 9. The movie just didn't give us enough information.

Orkeosaurus wrote:He protested the shooting of the prawn, when he knew he would be shocked for not cooperating. He seemed pretty surprised by the experiments when he came into the labs. He also tried to minimize needless conflict with the prawn while on patrol, and tried to avoid killing the security personnel when they went back to the labs with the alien weaponry.

I will give you all this...but honestly, when it came to not killing the prawns while serving the eviction notices, I felt that Wikus' largesse towards the prawn was like that of a slave master sparing a slave the rod for acting up. It was a patronizing sort of act, not a genuinely kind one.

Firing the weapon, I'll admit that I found that scene odd. Again, he didn't seem to care about the prawns at all. How do you square his describing the death of all those alien eggs with such animated joy with his not wanting to shoot a prawn? It's murder either way...

The not killing the security personnel is not wanting to kill humans, so that's not part of an argument per how Wikus felt about the prawns. I'd say that's an argument that he's not a violent person at heart which, again, makes the final moments of the film where he turns on and slaughters a bunch of MNU mercenaries wierd unless we say that he just lost his frakking mind after being hunted for so long.

Which, again, can question his motivations for helping Christopher.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Also, saving Christopher at the end was the climax of both the film's plotline and the characterization of Wikus. Disregarding it or minimizing its relevance makes very little sense. It's certainly at least as important as having knocked out Christopher to fly the command module itself, which was a pretty stupid plan anyway; if he had been logically looking out for nothing but his own self-interest he wouldn't have abandoned who was probably he only person capable of fixing his injury (the child was pretty smart, but as far as I can recall he never was shown to have that specific knowledge). He panicked and did something stupid.

I know it was the climax of the plot...I used to write movies. My B.S. is in Film.

Wikus wasn't thinking about anything when he stole the command module, I agree. His knocking out Christopher was an act of anger - I read that beat as Wikus realizing that Christopher was no longer of any use to him, and therefore he slugged him. Wikus returned to his true nature as to how he felt about the prawns - they were disposable.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Aside from knocking Christopher out, he didn't seem to do anything too terrible.

Again, I draw your attention to the burning of the eggs. That was a truly monstrous and barbaric act, and he was completely and utterly unconcerned about it. You can say he couldn't have stopped it, but that's not the point...the point is he was excited about it. He had no conception of what was being done. That's pretty scary.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Multi-National United was a single corporation, that is not only less than the government of the planet, it's less than the government of the nation the prawn landed in. They were hired by the government of one nation. The population of South Africa is around 1/250 of the world's population, and most of South Africa wasn't involved in the prawn's internment.

We can only speculate upon the true size of the corporation. We can look at the clues in the film, the name Multi-National United an the white vehicles and perhaps draw parallels with the UN. Follow the clues in the film, Aliens arrive with advanced technology and no other organisation interrupts? MNU is big.

Orkeosaurus wrote:I think there were about 2 million prawn in the camps? How many of them died because of their treatment? A fifth, at most?

Again we can only speculate, I wonder how many never hatched due to human interference over the past twenty years they spent in that concentration camp.

Orkeosaurus wrote: compared to about 6,500,000,000

What does this number represent? Why would the number of killed enemy be proportionate anyway?

1: Evil? I disagree. Selfish and shortsighted? Probably. Prone to selfish acts before altruism and social compliance over empathy, but not evil.
2: Christopher's promise to return is heavily implied as impossible. 'I'll never make it' could easily suggest that he can't survive the trip.
3: The film depicted the 1.8 million as malnourished and in need of care. There's no information to whether or not that 1.8 million is repeatable or can be militarized.
4: Christopher walked into an abbatoir that called itself a lab. Arguably anyone not prepared for what they saw would be shocked. Additionally, Christopher's friend was one of the subjects. Film cannot deliver the gravity of identifying a friend in the morgue. An abbatoir I can only assume is worse.
5: Armed eviction from a slum isn't exactly a cuddly experience. Especially one where the landlord is as likely to shoot you as not. A drunk crossdresser with a shovel is not something a bureaucrat should be giving crap to anyway. The one guard who did get his limb ripped clear off arguably earned it. Being stronger than us to that degree isn't combatative.




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Cairnius wrote:
Wikus wasn't thinking about anything when he stole the command module, I agree. His knocking out Christopher was an act of anger - I read that beat as Wikus realizing that Christopher was no longer of any use to him, and therefore he slugged him.

I can't agree. He returned to his comfortable indifference maybe. Christopher was the only one who could help him, and Wikus was prone to holding out a long hope (his calls with his wife). But he was frustrated. He created his own expectations, and angry when they were dashed with the 'three years' expectation. I Submit that Christopher knew there was nothing he could do with the dismissive way he delivered it, but Wikus never thought to ask (about so much!) how long the cure might take.

Again, I draw your attention to the burning of the eggs. That was a truly monstrous and barbaric act, and he was completely and utterly unconcerned about it.

An interesting question though. For 27 years of Wikus' life the Prawn were subhuman. His culture just got a boost over the wounds of apartheid by having a common enemy. I think the analogy for the prawn gets more frightening as the Afrikaans slang 'Kaffir' equates in English to somewhere between (that filtered N word) and cockroach. So this 27 years of oppression stacks with breeding permits. He was wiping out an infestation, not killing presentient beings. Its hard to understand the savagery of an act if one is culturally conditioned the act is acceptable.

Cairnius wrote:In that fictional universe? I think you may be misjudging the audience for District 9. I think people would look at what the MNU did and think that if the prawns did come back with vengeance in mind, it isn't the prawns job to try and decide which humans are good and which humans are evil. The humans certainly never seemed to look too deeply at the prawns, so why would the prawns follow suit?

All the prawns know is that the humans did what they did...so I think the audience of District 9 would not blame the prawns for coming back and seeking revenge on humanity. It would be quite understandable.

Now I'm quite confused. In my "alternate version of the movie" universe the humans were abused by the prawns in the movie.

Also, Christopher seemed to understand the legal papers being served to him at least. Both parties were able to speak each other's language. It seems unlikely that Christopher (who was the only prawn their homeworld would be talking to) was unaware of the fact that the planet they were on wasn't controlled by a single government, or that humans have had little to no contact with extraterrestrials.

Mistreatment of the kind we saw against the prawns is never justified, Orke. Ever. Take the historical analogues in human history that Blomkamp is clearly drawing off of and tell me that there's ever a justification for the way humans were treated by humans in those situations.

I wasn't talking about mistreatment, (especially as that's bad by definition). I was talking about the conflicts they get into specifically. The humans seemed worse than the prawn in the movie, but the prawn certainly weren't trying to make anything easier for the humans.

And "justified" may have been the wrong word to use; perhaps "understandable" would have better. The violence by the prawns wasn't any more justified than that of the humans, in the cases I saw. Just less frequent. How far back it goes is hard to tell, there were complaints in the movies about prawn stealing all sorts of stuff and attacking innocent people. Probably exaggerated and such, and not telling the whole side of the story, but I don't know if I'd assume that the prawn were acting better than the humans.

Human nature IS to get into conflicts that could result in their harm for no reason - they do it for emotion. They don't think, they feel and they act. Anger and vengeance alone account for how much violence in the world? These are not "reasoned action," they're emotional reaction.

In the end, the best we can say is that we don't know why the prawns and the humans were fighting prior to the prawns being moved into District 9. The movie just didn't give us enough information.

I didn't mean "reason" as in well-thought out reason. But they do need a cause, they're putting themselves at risk. You mentioned anger and vengeance; both of those are caused by something. You don't take revenge on someone who you don't perceive to have harmed you, and you generally don't get mad at someone who you're getting along with amicably.

I will give you all this...but honestly, when it came to not killing the prawns while serving the eviction notices, I felt that Wikus' largesse towards the prawn was like that of a slave master sparing a slave the rod for acting up. It was a patronizing sort of act, not a genuinely kind one.

I wouldn't say it was an "act", at least not in the sense that he was primarily doing it for the benefit of others. Patronizing, perhaps, he was pretty patronizing in general towards the prawn.

Firing the weapon, I'll admit that I found that scene odd. Again, he didn't seem to care about the prawns at all. How do you square his describing the death of all those alien eggs with such animated joy with his not wanting to shoot a prawn? It's murder either way...

Do you consider abortion to be murder? Not to be getting personal, but I wouldn't see the burning of the eggs as murder if the forming prawn weren't so neurologically developed as to be considered sentient, or sapient. Not exactly kindly, but not actual murder.

Then you also have to consider what Wikus knew of their development. Even if they weren't something that could be destroyed ethically if he had no means of finding this out he wasn't knowingly doing something wrong (for some reason it seemed like MNU was in charge of pretty much all knowledge of the aliens).

The not killing the security personnel is not wanting to kill humans, so that's not part of an argument per how Wikus felt about the prawns. I'd say that's an argument that he's not a violent person at heart which, again, makes the final moments of the film where he turns on and slaughters a bunch of MNU mercenaries weird unless we say that he just lost his frakking mind after being hunted for so long.

Which, again, can question his motivations for helping Christopher.

Fair enough, but it at least shows that he's not purely motivated by self-interest.

And with regards to freaking out on the mercenaries, I think he already sort of gave up on not trying to hurt anyone midway through the assault on the labs.

I know it was the climax of the plot...I used to write movies. My B.S. is in Film.

Wikus wasn't thinking about anything when he stole the command module, I agree. His knocking out Christopher was an act of anger - I read that beat as Wikus realizing that Christopher was no longer of any use to him, and therefore he slugged him. Wikus returned to his true nature as to how he felt about the prawns - they were disposable.

I saw it as more "I've come this far - I can't let anything stand in my way. I MUST BECOME HUMAN AGAIN". I think his racism towards the prawns entered into it, but I think he was more concerned with his arm.


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George Spiggott wrote:We can only speculate upon the true size of the corporation. We can look at the clues in the film, the name Multi-National United an the white vehicles and perhaps draw parallels with the UN. Follow the clues in the film, Aliens arrive with advanced technology and no other organisation interrupts? MNU is big.

I've only ever heard it described as being a multinational corporation. Even small companies often chose names that imply size and ubiquity, especially the kind that specialise in international business.

If they were the equivalent of the UN in the real world, I suppose it would be a different story, but only ever thought of them as a fairly powerful corporation. Which, even if comparable to the nation of South Africa in power, would still be small fry compared the entire world.

Again we can only speculate, I wonder how many never hatched due to human interference over the past twenty years they spent in that concentration camp.

What does this number represent? Why would the number of killed enemy be proportionate anyway?

The number is the world's population.

Why would it be proportionate? Because if the prawn have a system of morality like that of modern, western, Earth, they will probably not destroy an entire planet over an incident such as that. We're not simply talking about equal retribution, we would be talking about ten thousand dead for every one of them dead. A thousand dead for every one of them simply mistreated. Most of those dead having had nothing to do with the incident itself. Like I said before, killing everyone in Afghanistan for 9/11.

And they would have died without our intervention. As far as the movie tells they gave no notice to the planet that they were arriving at, and our species has never encountered another species of similar intelligence before. Considering the circumstances humanity didn't handle the situation well, but it wasn't horrific. Especially when you look at the conditions many humans live in.

If humanity as whole in the presentation of the film is taken as a character then it is a villain. The treatent of the prawns is quite deplorable, while the management of their treatment is ludicrously bad. The south african populace is racist, idiotic, uncarring, and seemingly bloodthirsty. The prawns are presented as stupid, sheepish, but strong and fierce.



In every film ever made the idiotic and cruel villain is beaten by the sheepish but strong hero.




Welcome to district nine. The movie that lets you know how it feels to be from the country all the evil people our action heroes fight feels like. Enjoy the story for what it was, the darker side of humanity when faced with both a great threat and a great opportunity. And not as a political statement.

EDIT - weird double posting bug.

mockingbirduk wrote:Given that they had just the one ship, which was dropped from the main ship during the evacuation, and which didn't work without fuel, they would have kind of a hard time getting to the mothership in order to forage. Unless they could persuade the local government to lend them a helicopter.

They spent 20 years scavenging for enough fuel for the mothership to get back to their home planet. I'd have thought they could have collected enough fuel to get the flyer back to the mothership in a few weeks. But remember that wasn't my question, that was Fraz's, I was just making a comment on it.

This was my main issue too... why were the city, the camp, the mothership and every other spare centimetre of the place not swarming with research units, UN reps, politicians etc etc? I can understand the lack of additional private weapons companies - the SA government would probably have had a tendering process and picked one researcher to give exclusive access in return for full disclosure/access to results.

The film was more about aliens as refugees, and when there was a choice between a plausible response to the arrival of aliens and making the alien situation like a refugee crisis, the film consistantly chose the latter. As a result it stretched credibility a few times, to say the least.

I got the impression they were inteded more to keep people out than in, but in the defence of the imaginary camp organisers, the aliens arrived in an enormous flying ship, and it doesn't hurt to be cautious.

Yeah, good point, I didn't think they might be there to keep activists out. That's one plot hole resolved, anyway.

Frazzled wrote:Why? Thats stupid. You're thinking in terms of philosophy and morality. No species survives because of the niceness of another species.

My dog is a Cavalier King Charles. I can assue he would not survive if it wasn't for the kindness of humans.

Meanwhile, your greater argument is that if the made up aliens landed on a planet you just made up, the other planet would enslave them or kill them. I'm not sure what that is, but it isn't an argument. Trying to extend that into a rant about why you shouldn't have empathy for those in need is absurd.

It wasn't a complicated movie. Aliens turned up. Weak willed guy is part of group that treats aliens badly, just like we treat people in refugee camps. Stuff happens and guy learns what it is like to live like aliens, in turn maybe we see what it is like . He feels empathy for them, and eventually helps one of them return home.

Cue message about how we should feel bad for the people here on Earth in refugee camps. And that's it. That's the absolute total of the meaning of the film.


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George Spiggott wrote:We can only speculate upon the true size of the corporation. We can look at the clues in the film, the name Multi-National United an the white vehicles and perhaps draw parallels with the UN.

No, they make a big and specific deal of the fact the MNU is a private company. The film is quite explicit in condemning the use of for-profit companies in humanitarian work.

Follow the clues in the film, Aliens arrive with advanced technology and no other organisation interrupts? MNU is big.

That wasn't a clue, it was a contrivance for the sake of theme. And no company, no matter how big, could control acces to the arrival of several hundred thousand aliens. The only way aliens could arrive and not have the whole thing controlled by a coalition of governments would be if it were taking place in a movie that didn't care about the realities of an alien arrival, as it was trying to make a point about refugees.

sebster wrote:No, they make a big and specific deal of the fact the MNU is a private company. The film is quite explicit in condemning the use of for-profit companies in humanitarian work... ...That wasn't a clue, it was a contrivance for the sake of theme.

I should add that I believe that MNU are also an allegory for Blackwater as well as the UN (or at least a facett of it), a private company amalgamation of the two. No contrivance, all part of the film.

sebster wrote:

mockingbirduk wrote:Given that they had just the one ship, which was dropped from the main ship during the evacuation, and which didn't work without fuel, they would have kind of a hard time getting to the mothership in order to forage. Unless they could persuade the local government to lend them a helicopter.

They spent 20 years scavenging for enough fuel for the mothership to get back to their home planet. I'd have thought they could have collected enough fuel to get the flyer back to the mothership in a few weeks. But remember that wasn't my question, that was Fraz's, I was just making a comment on it.

I'm quite convinced that the fuel collected was to power the small ship/command module/lander or whatever. Once they powered it up and got the command software running the big ship was able to move and use its transporter beam device BEFORE the 'fuel' made it to the mothership. furthermore, I'm pretty sure Christopher tells the human protagonist that they need the fuel to reach the mothership, not they need it to power to mothership.

It's a little confusing that they needed that much fuel, but the human was able to spray his own face without them going "well, another three years collecting before I can use it now".

One question I feel it raised was whether the alien society's castes are particularly friendly with one another - Chirstopher and his son, while physically weaker than the other aliens, were clearly more intelligent (or at least, massively more educated). One possible conclusion is that he's the 'captain' of the ship, but in that case, why did he not have a lot of folks working for him collecting the fuel? Just him and one other guy? Why not a big movement? My personal take on it is that the 'workers' may not be employees as much as they are semi-slaves, with no opportunity for advancement. They could even, horribly enough, be effectively cargo. If that's the case, then finding themselves suddenly freed from their bondage (no 'guards', no 'bosses') may make them an extremely dangerous group to someone in Christopher's (fomer) position, hence the need for secrecy.

M.