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Saw District 9 tonight expecting something fairly thought provoking or interesting. What really made it stand out is that it is unique and the product of a truly creative mind. To my knowledge there is no movie quite like it. The filming, story, acting, and plot are all great and really bring about a great package.

The one part I am not certain on is the political subtexts. From what I have heard the movie is fairly explicitly about apartheid and if so it presents a somewhat odd take on it.

All in all I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi , thought-provoking, or creatively made movies,

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This was not a sequel or a film version of another property, which nowadays is commendable in itself. The actors were unknown, yet very good. The action sequences were well depicted, it was possible to follow what was happening and not merely a blizzard of quick cuts attempting to counterfeit energy with confusion. The protagonist actually gains stature in the course of the plot, moving from conformist cog in a machine to a bit of a hero.

It had its cliches. All the great atrocities in history have been committed by governments, yet every sci-fi movie always has an evil corporation grinding up bodies for cash. I tire of resisting the brainwashing.

The aliens were quite mysterious, but they are aliens after all. Still, how do let your mothership run of gas?

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Still, how do let your mothership run of gas?

Put Al Gore in charge of the fill up? :)

Thanks for the reviews, everyone. My kids want to see it for the previews, but maybe this will prompt me to take them sooner rather than later.

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Be sure your kids can take mature content. Its a dark movie with plenty of violence and the shadier portions of humanity

Roger that. Is it R or PG13? Haven't kept track. Went to Terminator 4 last week. And we have lots of discussions about how the current government takes from individuals. That's more dark.

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It's R. Basically the alien weapons make people pop in a way that they basically go splat and there is much of that. On top of that there is some sexual references and i guess alien-rights abuses where they experiment on the aliens. I would look into the rating a little more yourself before you go.

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Saw District 9 tonight expecting something fairly thought provoking or interesting. What really made it stand out is that it is unique and the product of a truly creative mind. To my knowledge there is no movie quite like it. The filming, story, acting, and plot are all great and really bring about a great package.

The one part I am not certain on is the political subtexts. From what I have heard the movie is fairly explicitly about apartheid and if so it presents a somewhat odd take on it.

All in all I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi , thought-provoking, or creatively made movies,

(Spoiler alert)

Sorry...hated it. Superficial posing as deep. Had its moments, and a Twilight-Zone-ish vibe, but I think it was too shallow to be good allegory. It just felt like one big gang war, with the aliens supposedly the "moral" ones, but not even. It really just felt like an attack on humanity, how we're monsters at heart, with the character of Wikus as some kind of "Christ-like" figure (in the sense that he sacrifices himself to atone for humanity's sins.) Their was a comment about the "aliens" and the concept of property rights, yet they are presented as bottom-feeding scavengers (prawns). I'm not sure if this was an attack on capitalism, it felt like it, though. It had a "pro-Palestinian" vibe to it, more specifically an "anti-apartheid" vibe, yet black and white are depicted as united...in their manipulation and genocide of the aliens. It was just a mess, philosophically. The whole "hybrid" gimmick (the Twilight Zone gimmick) falls flat, because the idea that "deep down, we're all the same" is presented here as mere multiculturalism. Supposedly, it could be twisted to say that what makes us human is our conceptual faculty, since the aliens and humans could speak to each other, and that we shouldn't view each other as animals. But then, why ignore the United States and the fact that we do, in fact, have such concepts already? (The fact that this was set in Africa is telling, so is the fact that America is not mentioned.)

In other words, same ol' philosophic trash.

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Supposedly, it could be twisted to say that what makes us human is our conceptual faculty, since the aliens and humans could speak to each other, and that we shouldn't view each other as animals. But then, why ignore the United States and the fact that we do, in fact, have such concepts already? (The fact that this was set in Africa is telling, so is the fact that America is not mentioned.)

Can you clarify this statement? The aliens were clearly rational creatures, so there was no reason to treat them as "less than human" so to speak. Force was used against the aliens for no particular reason (probably for the "Greater Good of Mankind"). Humans could have traded and made valuable scientific discoveries. But they didn't. I don't think there was much of an element of multiculturalism at all. The mystical-in-nature Nigerian gang was clearly portrayed as bad. Philosophically, I agree that it is messy and inconsistent.

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The aliens were inherently violent and would not conform to sensible laws (burning trucks, derailing trains). Now, you shouldn't set up state-funded ghettos for them but still, the movie definitely had an element of multiculturalism.

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Can you clarify this statement? The aliens were clearly rational creatures, so there was no reason to treat them as "less than human" so to speak. Force was used against the aliens for no particular reason (probably for the "Greater Good of Mankind"). Humans could have traded and made valuable scientific discoveries. But they didn't. I don't think there was much of an element of multiculturalism at all. The mystical-in-nature Nigerian gang was clearly portrayed as bad. Philosophically, I agree that it is messy and inconsistent.

Were the aliens clearly rational? (I've heard arguments on this board saying it was ok to kill Indians and such for not being "fully rational.") Actually, I can't clarify, because it's not clear whether the aliens were fully rational, the movie was too lazy to present such a case.

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Seeing as the alien Christopher Jones could come up with plans and repair a spaceship over 20 years I would say they were rational. Now did the majority of them choose to be rational decent beings? Certainly not.

The movie is about apartheid and I think that it shows that in situations where one group is discriminated against it can seem easier to keep them that way because they do not exert their rational mind but it is always necessary to respect the individual rights of any being despite them being more aimless. I think it takes a stand by Wikus' choice in the end by saying that all groups deserve rights. What it does not shy away from is that you may not like the group that is lacking in rights, which makes the choice harder, especially when they are violent but the end result must be the same

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From an artistic standpoint I thought the film was bad. Not very bad, because it beats the crap out of Transformers, but also not good.

It started out as a documentary but that was quickly dropped in favor of a straight-out action film, with only a few moments of documentary interspersed. Basically, the documentary style was used only to provide exposition, and after that was done, they used action film tropes to tell the rest of the story. Pretty lame...

Story wise, it could have been much better. I was glad it didn't have a heavy-handed political message about apartheid, but at the same time, there were far too many plot holes and un-thought-out aspects of the backstory, story, and characters that I just couldn't believe any of what was going on.

1) Christopher, the single intelligent alien, extracts fuel from technology unique to his species. How did that technology get down to Earth from their mothership? Presumably they brought it down. If that's the case, then their mothership is FULL OF FUEL. How could it have run out of fuel, as they state clearly in the film several times, and stall? These two facts contradict each other, yet they are both important plot points.

2) How does the ship stay levitated above the surface without constantly firing its engines? Clearly the aliens possess highly advanced technology able to resist gravity.

3) The aliens possess high-powered guns that can kill multiple people in a single blast, and they keep them stock-piled in their shanty town, yet they NEVER use them to break out and get back to their mothership? Why not just vaporize the Nigerians and take all their food?

4) We are told the aliens have no concept of private property, and thus derail trains and loot all the time. Yet, they barter with the Nigerians - giving them guns in exchange for cat food. The only reason they would do that instead of just taking the cat food is because they understand private property. Blatantly self-contradictory.

5) Why did the aliens even come down to the surface in the first place? Did the humans bring them down, by force, on helicopters 5 people at a time? Why? That would have taken decades, if there were indeed 1 million of them onboard. And, if humans ferried them down on helicopters, how the f*** did they get their huge, super-powerful guns down with them? Not to mention that giant mech-suit. Glaring error.

6) If the only reason the aliens are staying on Earth is to get enough fuel to leave, and the humans hate the aliens and want them to go home, why not just help them find the fuel to get them off the planet that much faster? It's like, "oh sure, you just need some fuel. here, done, now leave." No need to hire expensive security, create an expensive district, and enslave a whole city-size population for years.

7) Clearly the only reason the mech-suit and the huge guns are in the movie is so the protagonist can use them at the end to create some eye-candy. They serve no other plot purpose, especially since the aliens never use them...even though they are the ONLY ones capable of doing so because they are DNA-encoded.

8) How can a few droplets of fuel turn the protagonist into an alien? Are we expected to believe that the equivalent of natural gas will do this to us? So, if I were to pour gasoline on one of the aliens, would he turn into a human? You might as well sprinkle fairy dust on the protagonist.

9) The protagonist is supposed to be a sympathetic character - a normal, average, weak-willed, fairly dumb, not physically strong guy - who is "just doing his job" without thinking about the consequences to the aliens, yet he takes PLEASURE, VISIBLE PLEASURE in slaughtering their unborn? That is NOT "just doing your job." That's outright evil, and thus an obvious flaw in the writing of his character. Yes, he's supposed to be unaware of the evil of what he's doing until he has a change of heart, but no one can be THAT unaware. No one except a straight-out Nazi thinks it's OK to do that.

10) The private security is just the typical "evil" company, and of course no real explanation is given as to WHY they like killing aliens except that they make "a lot of money." Pretty lame reason.

11) The father-in-law of the protagonist is as wooden as they come. He's "just evil" and is willing at the drop of a hat to sacrifice his son-in-law and lie to his daughter. WTF?! No explanation at all, no character motivation given at all. Even the dialog in that scene is rushed and simplistic. He isn't even being black-mailed or being held hostage by the MNU.

12) When the protagonist is obviously VERY ill at his surprise birthday party, all the guests are stupidly oblivious to his condition. NO ONE IS THIS OBLIVIOUS. This is just a cliche, where the protagonist is sick/in a bad way/in urgent need of doing something important, but everyone else is oblivious to it and delays him. LAME.

13) Why does the protagonist need to turn into one of the aliens for us to feel sympathetic for him or for him to "gain a new perspective" on the aliens? Why can't he just do that as a human?

14) The scenes of him turning into an alien become gratuitous once we are forced to see him taking his fingernails off and his teeth out. The teeth-removal scene was 2/3rds of the way into the film! We KNOW he's turning into an alien, for God's sake! The audience isn't that retarded!

15) The last 30 minutes of the movie are NOTHING but action movie cliches. Average guy picks up a gun and becomes a super hero, totally unafraid of the thousands of bullets flying past him, able to aim huge guns perfectly and kills dozens of highly-trained soldiers. RIDICULOUS. Then, the alien pauses in the middle of the battle raging about him, not caring whether he lives or dies, so he can take the time out to mourn his fallen comrades in the autopsy room. Doesn't this alien know by now what humans do to his kind? Why does it come as such a shocker to him that we would dissect and torture his friends? And again, it's cliche for someone to pause in the middle of a battle to mourn the death of a fallen comrade, totally not caring about the bullets flying past him because he's just bada$$ like that. And then, to make it even worse, the protagonist gets inside the huge mech-suit and in a last ditch effort, in a pitched-battle, he fights off thousands of guys single-handedly, just to save the alien he has come to respect. I remember a scene like that in a Mechwarrior video game I played 10 years ago. How LAME. It's like, "Haha, I'm mad as hell because you want to kill this alien-dude who's my friend. So I'll pour my rage out at you, taking everything you fling at me, even RPGs, and still keep fighting." We know this action trope from so many movies, it just doesn't work anymore. The mech-suit is just such obvious pathetic fallacy that I can't even take it.

16) During the final firefight, the alien escapes the thousands of bullets using a piece of thin, scrap metal barely the size of his head to shield himself. Huh? Are we expected to believe this?

17) The head of the Nigerian gang says "I'm gonna get you" to the protagonist. What a stupid, overused line. Yes, we all know the badguy will come get him. How "tough" of him to say that.

18) The worst plot whole of all comes right at the end. The alien and his son are trying to escape in the command module that had fallen and buried itself underground when the mothership first stalled above Earth. Yet, once the engine is torn off, the kid ends up signaling the mothership to move and pick up the fallen command module with a beam. Then WHY DID THEY NEED THE FUEL?!?!?! If the mothership can do all of that, REMOTELY, then why do you need fuel? And, if the mothership can move, then it's clearly NOT OUT OF FUEL. What a huge load of contradictions there.

19) Why did the protagonist have to stay on Earth? Why couldn't they just pick him up instead of some stupid line about "3 years." I hate it when plots are held back by unbelievable "contingencies." Like, oh, sorry, my suit failed and I was too stupid to get out and RUN to the ship. Just come back in 3 years. WTF?!

20) The protagonist's wife is a totally worthless character. She adds nothing to the plot or the story, does not make the protagonist any more sympathetic, and has an unexplained change of heart, which we only hear about over the phone. Not to mention she keeps calling, unwittingly allowing MNU to track her husband. What a retard. EVERYONE knows that the government can trace calls. Everyone. I simply cannot believe that she would be so stupid as to do that.

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4) We are told the aliens have no concept of private property, and thus derail trains and loot all the time. Yet, they barter with the Nigerians - giving them guns in exchange for cat food. The only reason they would do that instead of just taking the cat food is because they understand private property. Blatantly self-contradictory.

I agree with all your other points, except this one. The point was that the humans accused all aliens of having no concept of private property. But obviously that accusation was incorrect. It was not stated as a fact about the aliens. Just like people in real life, some people understand private property, others don't. But it is not accurate to say "all of X people do not understand private property". It is an example of stories (evasions) people make up to re-affirm their beliefs. "Oh since they're aliens and look like bugs, they must be incapable of rational thought, despite the fact that they are capable of galactic travel. Some aliens are violent, therefore it is an inherent characteristic of aliens to be violent." It's not like that hasn't actually happened in the world (basically any place there has been segregation and slavery). The aliens demonstrated characteristics of a rational species: private property, language, trade, technology. And almost every human in the movie ignored that.

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1) Christopher, the single intelligent alien, extracts fuel from technology unique to his species. How did that technology get down to Earth from their mothership? Presumably they brought it down. If that's the case, then their mothership is FULL OF FUEL. How could it have run out of fuel, as they state clearly in the film several times, and stall? These two facts contradict each other, yet they are both important plot points.

I don't remember anyone saying that the reasons the aliens were not leaving Earth was because they ran out of fuel here. The aliens came, and their ship was motionless for months, it wasn't until the South African government sent in recon that they discovered that the prauns inside were infected with some sort of disease. They evacuated the surviving Prauns, probably also took a bunch of alien technology with them for study, and left. There is no reason to believe that they do not continuously send helicopters to retrieve more technology from the mothership all the time. They always showed several helicopters hovering around the mothership. They clearly stated that a piece of the mothership fell down from it and became lost, this piece was obviously the command module which Christopher Johnson hid, in a stroke of intelligence, as the human governments probably would've taken it and dissected it.

3) The aliens possess high-powered guns that can kill multiple people in a single blast, and they keep them stock-piled in their shanty town, yet they NEVER use them to break out and get back to their mothership? Why not just vaporize the Nigerians and take all their food?

4) We are told the aliens have no concept of private property, and thus derail trains and loot all the time. Yet, they barter with the Nigerians - giving them guns in exchange for cat food. The only reason they would do that instead of just taking the cat food is because they understand private property. Blatantly self-contradictory.

The aliens obviously have a concept of private property, in the same way a hood raised gang banger still has some concept of private property. The commentary of the interviewees is showed as very biased several times, the comment on them not having a concept of property rights is obviously an example of such bias. The aliens are stated as being the 'worker' class of their alien society, where the leader class all died off due to whatever disease they had. If you translate worker class to working class and imagine that since they have -classes- it is likely they were a form of communism then you can imagine that this working class is probably a huge population of undereducated entitlement-feeling needys. Their undereducation is probably the cause of the blatant disregard for the welfare of humans, and for their tribalistic mentality. It is also probably why when the Nigerians held guns to their head and presented themselves as an authority they willingly submitted out of a need to be led. That, in combination with the fact that the Nigerians could now supply them with something that was obviously like crack for them, catfood, made them view the Nigerians as a valid trader, instead of just some animal in their way.

A real question would be what the hell are a bunch of Nigerians doing in South Africa? The bigger population of South Africa's blacks are Zulu. My personal theory is that to avoid ruffling the Zulu's feathers and depicting them as tribal savages, particularly since the movie holds a strong dint of Apartheid, they wanted to use an ethnicity that was easier to hate.

5) Why did the aliens even come down to the surface in the first place? Did the humans bring them down, by force, on helicopters 5 people at a time? Why? That would have taken decades, if there were indeed 1 million of them onboard. And, if humans ferried them down on helicopters, how the f*** did they get their huge, super-powerful guns down with them? Not to mention that giant mech-suit. Glaring error.

6) If the only reason the aliens are staying on Earth is to get enough fuel to leave, and the humans hate the aliens and want them to go home, why not just help them find the fuel to get them off the planet that much faster? It's like, "oh sure, you just need some fuel. here, done, now leave." No need to hire expensive security, create an expensive district, and enslave a whole city-size population for years.

It is possible that the alien population was much smaller when the humans discovered them, and it grew when they came down, causing the humans to 'have' to control their population before it got any bigger. Notice that a single hatch of eggs contained several, their population can probably grow very quickly, especially being a worker class in a society of insect-like beings. As far as the weapons, the government -wanted- those weapons. They wanted to try each and every one of them out to see if just one could be manipulated to work with humans. They would've figured out a way to bring them down. And once they couldn't get them to work, they probably would have just thrown them out. That's where the Nigerians could have gone to salvage them. Or the aliens, if there was a short era where the aliens were allowed to run free, as is obvious by the fact that they were destroying human property.

Again, the reason they are on Earth is because the command module of the mothership fell off and is lost. The -only- aliens who know of the command module's location is Christopher Johnson, his son, and his friend who dies in the beginning. Christopher Johnson doesn't want the technology of the command module to fall into the hands of the government because it is likely that they will want to try and take it apart and analyze it more than they will want to help him find fuel and help them go on their merry way. Without the command module the ship doesn't go anywhere, the aliens are stuck, and the UN pressured the SA government into 'doing something about it.' That something was hiring MNU to provide private security and housing.

7) Clearly the only reason the mech-suit and the huge guns are in the movie is so the protagonist can use them at the end to create some eye-candy. They serve no other plot purpose, especially since the aliens never use them...even though they are the ONLY ones capable of doing so because they are DNA-encoded.

8) How can a few droplets of fuel turn the protagonist into an alien? Are we expected to believe that the equivalent of natural gas will do this to us? So, if I were to pour gasoline on one of the aliens, would he turn into a human? You might as well sprinkle fairy dust on the protagonist.

9) The protagonist is supposed to be a sympathetic character - a normal, average, weak-willed, fairly dumb, not physically strong guy - who is "just doing his job" without thinking about the consequences to the aliens, yet he takes PLEASURE, VISIBLE PLEASURE in slaughtering their unborn? That is NOT "just doing your job." That's outright evil, and thus an obvious flaw in the writing of his character. Yes, he's supposed to be unaware of the evil of what he's doing until he has a change of heart, but no one can be THAT unaware. No one except a straight-out Nazi thinks it's OK to do that.

The aliens likely did not use weapons because of their lack of drive. Clearly some of them used the weapons, as it shows some aliens trying to trade weapons in for catfood to the Nigerians. However I don't think most of the aliens had any real will or reason to pick up a weapon, none of them knew anything about the struggle of Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van de Merwe.

The alien weapons are very obviously described as being partly biological in nature. It would then follow that the fuel for their ships is likely also biological. It could be a tactical advantage in a war to be able to have a last ditch weapon to convert the enemy, or possibly host colony, into you.

I think Wikus taking his genocidal and murderous actions as just 'part of the job' is more of a reflection on Wikus' character than it is on the quality of the plot.

10) The private security is just the typical "evil" company, and of course no real explanation is given as to WHY they like killing aliens except that they make "a lot of money." Pretty lame reason.

11) The father-in-law of the protagonist is as wooden as they come. He's "just evil" and is willing at the drop of a hat to sacrifice his son-in-law and lie to his daughter. WTF?! No explanation at all, no character motivation given at all. Even the dialog in that scene is rushed and simplistic. He isn't even being black-mailed or being held hostage by the MNU.

12) When the protagonist is obviously VERY ill at his surprise birthday party, all the guests are stupidly oblivious to his condition. NO ONE IS THIS OBLIVIOUS. This is just a cliche, where the protagonist is sick/in a bad way/in urgent need of doing something important, but everyone else is oblivious to it and delays him. LAME.

I agree with all the above.

13) Why does the protagonist need to turn into one of the aliens for us to feel sympathetic for him or for him to "gain a new perspective" on the aliens? Why can't he just do that as a human?

The point of the movie is for the protagonist to go from complete moral obtuseness to a new moral awareness. The degree of Wikus' moral obtuseness disallowed persuasion in any other form than force.

14) The scenes of him turning into an alien become gratuitous once we are forced to see him taking his fingernails off and his teeth out. The teeth-removal scene was 2/3rds of the way into the film! We KNOW he's turning into an alien, for God's sake! The audience isn't that retarded!

The purpose of the tooth scene is to add a shocking and emotional value to the scene where he realizes that he may be stuck like this, and he is losing everything he loved.

15) The last 30 minutes of the movie are NOTHING but action movie cliches. Average guy picks up a gun and becomes a super hero, totally unafraid of the thousands of bullets flying past him, able to aim huge guns perfectly and kills dozens of highly-trained soldiers. RIDICULOUS. Then, the alien pauses in the middle of the battle raging about him, not caring whether he lives or dies, so he can take the time out to mourn his fallen comrades in the autopsy room. Doesn't this alien know by now what humans do to his kind? Why does it come as such a shocker to him that we would dissect and torture his friends? And again, it's cliche for someone to pause in the middle of a battle to mourn the death of a fallen comrade, totally not caring about the bullets flying past him because he's just bada$$ like that. And then, to make it even worse, the protagonist gets inside the huge mech-suit and in a last ditch effort, in a pitched-battle, he fights off thousands of guys single-handedly, just to save the alien he has come to respect. I remember a scene like that in a Mechwarrior video game I played 10 years ago. How LAME. It's like, "Haha, I'm mad as hell because you want to kill this alien-dude who's my friend. So I'll pour my rage out at you, taking everything you fling at me, even RPGs, and still keep fighting." We know this action trope from so many movies, it just doesn't work anymore. The mech-suit is just such obvious pathetic fallacy that I can't even take it.

If you attack a tribe of savages with bows and arrows with a squad carrying assault rifles, who will win? It is very painfully obvious that the alien technology is far more advanced than ours. The 'splat' gun seems to have very little need to aim as it's a beam and it seems to be attracted to whatever organic thing you're pointing in the general direction of, much like the ghostbusters' weapons. As far as the mech scene, nothing came to mind during that scene for me except 'AWESOME'. Yes, I've done that all before in a video game, but I've also played the Hot Coffee mod of GTA, and that didn't make me go 'OH MAN, SO CLICHE' every time I watch a porn now.

16) During the final firefight, the alien escapes the thousands of bullets using a piece of thin, scrap metal barely the size of his head to shield himself. Huh? Are we expected to believe this?

17) The head of the Nigerian gang says "I'm gonna get you" to the protagonist. What a stupid, overused line. Yes, we all know the badguy will come get him. How "tough" of him to say that.

The metal was probably alien metal. The Nigerian is uneducated, do you expect him to say 'NEXT TIME, I SHALL DESTROY YOU, BUZZ LIGHTYEAR!!!'?

18) The worst plot whole of all comes right at the end. The alien and his son are trying to escape in the command module that had fallen and buried itself underground when the mothership first stalled above Earth. Yet, once the engine is torn off, the kid ends up signaling the mothership to move and pick up the fallen command module with a beam. Then WHY DID THEY NEED THE FUEL?!?!?! If the mothership can do all of that, REMOTELY, then why do you need fuel? And, if the mothership can move, then it's clearly NOT OUT OF FUEL. What a huge load of contradictions there.

It stalled because they didn't have the command module. Chris couldn't get the command module on because where was no fuel. They needed fuel to turn on the command module so it could activate the dormant ship commands and go 'hey yo, I'm here now.' and give remote commands to the ship. Also, the child is shown as being good at repairing stuff, it is likely the remote functions were broken until the child fixed them after just flying up to the mothership became impossible.

19) Why did the protagonist have to stay on Earth? Why couldn't they just pick him up instead of some stupid line about "3 years." I hate it when plots are held back by unbelievable "contingencies." Like, oh, sorry, my suit failed and I was too stupid to get out and RUN to the ship. Just come back in 3 years. WTF?!

Wikus needed to hold the attention of all the PMC soldiers. They're not after Chris, nor the command module, they're after Wikus. If Wikus were on the command module, they'd just shoot it down again.

20) The protagonist's wife is a totally worthless character. She adds nothing to the plot or the story, does not make the protagonist any more sympathetic, and has an unexplained change of heart, which we only hear about over the phone. Not to mention she keeps calling, unwittingly allowing MNU to track her husband. What a retard. EVERYONE knows that the government can trace calls. Everyone. I simply cannot believe that she would be so stupid as to do that.

I think the wife character did make Wikus more sympathetic. I also think the second phonecall in which she took Wikus back was her working -with- her father, hoping to get Wikus home to the 'help' that he needs, as several commentators mention that all they wanted for Wikus was to help him.

All in all I enjoyed the movie, I'll probably buy it on DVD, and I look forward to a sequel.

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Yeah, I agree with a lot of your rebuttals, but you missed my point about the weapons. Let me just set up the chain of events quickly

1) Alien ship stalls above Earth

2) Government sends teams onboard to investigate

3) They find aliens and their super-powerful weapons

4) The aliens come down but they get to KEEP THEIR WEAPONS

That's my point. If the government wanted the weapons, they would have taken them to begin with. Yet, the aliens clearly get to keep them all because they stock pile them in their shanty town while teams of soldiers go around looking for them. They had the chance to confiscate them all when the alien ship originally arrived and the aliens were too weak to fight back because of malnutrition and disease. No matter how you think about it, it's just contrived.

Also, the ship is NOT stalled because they don't have the command module. The events clearly happen in this order: 1) ship stalls, THEN hours/days/weeks later, 2) command module falls out. It's not the other way around. It just mysteriously stalled.

About #18: OK, so they needed fuel to turn the module on, quite true, but then why bother lifting off and flying to the ship. Surely Christopher was smart enough to see the huge Anti-aircraft gun emplacements. He's been there for 20 years. If the mothership has a huge beam that can lift the module up to it, then just bring the mothership to the module, and lift up out of the ground just enough for the beam to take you up the rest of the way.

As for the tooth scene, we already understand how personal his situation is. We know he's turning into an alien, we can see his arm and foot growing out of his clothes, and we can see his back breaking out with scales. We already know he's going to be stuck like this because he knew that before his teeth came out. Unless he gets treatment, we all know he'll turn into an alien completely.

If willingly participating in genocide is part of Wikus' character, then he deserves all he can get. I felt like they didn't understand how to form his character. He's supposed to be a normal guy just blindly doing his job. He clearly thinks he's doing good for the aliens, but no one, no matter how blind they are, could think that killing babies is good for any race. That's just plain evil. That's why it's bad characterization. He's too much of a mix of normal guy blindly following orders/total evil guy killing babies. I think they went TOO far by making him do that and enjoying it.

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I am simply pasting my recent review of this movie.

There is a subtle message of District 9 which its creator never mentions explicitly. He is not concerned with moralizing – there is no mention of rights in this movie about interment camps, poverty, genetic experimentation, and murder. Nor is the creator concerned with a thematic message – the movie does not attempt to sum itself up under a uniting abstraction. What the creator wants you to feel is intense suffering through the plight of aliens who act like brutal savages out of an African slum. He wants to make you sick with the presentation of prostitutes, slum lords, dismemberment, and gore that would make any healthy man wince. He wants you to feel sadness and pity for two beings who are caught in a horrible existence governed by forces beyond their control. Yet this is not his purpose, they are merely the devices employed to prepare the audience to accept the actual theme of the film.

It is stated only briefly, at the end, a single idea which the audience is slowly led to accept. The creator does not intend for the audience to recognize it fully, but to let the events of the film serve as an unidentified group of concretes that will come to mind when the audience reflects on the issue. Like a gambler tipping his hand, the creator reveals what this issue is at the last moment, splitting the audience into two categories: those who can grasp his theme, and those who cannot. The artist, by virtue of how he hides it, hopes the audience is stupid enough to fall into the latter so he can con them into accepting the theme blindly.

The message is that corporations are evil, and will do whatever they can to acquire weapons, power, and money, even at the expense of sacrificing the lives of volitional creatures. The creator believes that corporations are so powerful in their pursuit of profit that governments are simply their tools, and that multinational CEO’s are the true rulers of the world. When an alien spacecraft arrives in South Africa bearing 1.5 million starving, impoverished alien refugees, it is not the government of South Africa who processes them and releases them into the public – it is a private corporation which locks them in to a slum, guarded by a mercenary police-force and missile turrets. When the aliens are to be relocated into a concentration camp, it is the not done through the police and courts, but the corporation’s private army – whose actions are somehow illegal despite the fact they own the slum in which the aliens live. When the main character is infected with DNA that will slowly turn him into an alien, he is captured by the CEO, whose daughter the main character is married to, and used for weapons testing. During the process, the main character is needlessly forced to kill an alien. When the single alien who is a thinking being instead of the horrible savages that are his brethren attempts to go home, the corporation stops him with a missile.

This is all done in unintellectual terms, with the usual blame placed on the profit motive as if the pursuit of money necessarily leads a man to evil, but it is at the conclusion of the movie in which the true ugliness of the film is revealed. One of the men who works at the corporation is arrested for exposing the illegal activities of his employer. Logically, how can a man be arrested for exposing someone breaking the law? The answer is simple: there is no such thing as law or government, only war-mongering “Capitalists” who are the secret dictators of man’s existence.

Qua work of art, this movie is like a walking abortion. You will be treated to “Saw” level grotesqueness: chopped off limbs, gunshot wounds, exploding corpses, meat lockers.There is nothing redeeming in any of the characters, with the exception of the thinking alien. They are simply average men placed in unaverage situations. Your questions about the plot will not be answered. The film never bothers to answer such questions as why the corporation has that much power, why the government does nothing, even why the aliens arrived. The artist purposefully leaves the ending open, on a sad note, to inflict more emotional pain upon the audience. The audience is merely supposed to swallow it all like the dumb aliens in the movie and accept the creator’s conclusion.

Edited by Daniel Casper
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I really think that the only reason a Corporation did the horrible acts as opposed to the government is that the government in that area is not very strong or well funded. The government, under pressure from other nations turned to one possibility, a more well funded corporation. It's a metaphor for apartheid, the corporation simply represented mercenary forces that have worked in South Africa during those times.

Corporations are a morally neutral device by nature like individuals. They can exploit and hurt people or they cannot. Because this movie had one corporation int he entire world doing this does not mean all corporations are evil just that that fictional one was evil. How did you get that the point of the whole movie was corporations are evil? To me it was much more that some groups make others out to be less than human to make them easier to oppress in their own minds.

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The documentary style was, I thought, only mildly annoying but largely forgettable.

As for the plot-holes, I don’t think they’re so hole-y as all that. I mean, they dropped down technology that could be used to produce fuel over the course of 20 years. So that would mean that the ship is not necessarily full of fuel. How does it hover? We don’t know their technology, but the idea seems to be that having the ship hover was like making it tread water—it takes energy, but not much relative to the power needed to propel them across the universe to their homes.

They rebel and fight because they knew that, though they had more advanced weapons, they couldn’t fight off the whole planet. Moreover, they were starving and needed the food on the planet surface, so they couldn’t just run back to their ship. Once they had the fuel, though, they didn’t need to have the buried ship fly up—that was just the way that seemed best for the character in that situation. When the ship got downed, the next best thing was to have the mothership pull it up, now that it has fuel to go back home. I don’t get the insistence on the fuel thing. They had enough fuel for small functions, not enough to travel far and fast.

They probably came down to the surface because they were starving on their ship. Nobody seemed to know that new fuel could be produced except the one guy who was doing—I don’t know why the information didn’t get out. Maybe they didn’t ask him and he couldn’t get in touch with anyone important enough to inform them. That might be something of a plot hole. But once there, people don’t want them to fly off because they want the weapons and bio tech.

It’s a little silly that the fuel turned the guy into an alien, but whatever, it’s just part of the fiction, not a plot hole. I don’t see why this would imply anything about fossil fuels.

And I don’t know that the guy took pleasure in killing their young—he seemed squeamish about killing any of them, and didn’t think of the unhatched eggs as alive and was just entertained by the popping sound they made when burned. And I don’t think he’s supposed to be innocent and just following orders, anyway. He doesn’t seem to recognize or care about their lives, except as something like lower-life forms, presumably because of the way they live.

I thought the stupidity of the people at the party was pretty silly, too. Especially when he was shaking people’s hands and his fingernails were supposedly fallen off. Nobody noticed? What about his dizziness and the fact that he coughed up black gunk? Who coughs up black gunk unless he’s turning into an alien? Everyone should have known exactly what’s going on.

As for him “needing” to turn into an alien to feel sympathetic, I don’t think that’s supposed to be a broad statement about humanity, but just that this guy didn’t get it and didn’t feel the need to care, until he was put into that situation himself. I did find it annoying that the film had no characters who were alien-rights activists. You know millions of bleeding-heart liberals would come marching out of the woodwork to South Africa if anything like that story were true.

His turning into an alien, though, was more just part of the story. It didn’t happen all at once, so 2/3s into the story, it’s still going on. That doesn’t seem like a problem.

I don’t get the point about the mech suit being a fallacy. A movie device for explosion scenes and a really awkward “I’m not afraid of you,” scene, but a fallacy?

And I guess the guy couldn’t go along because people were already trying to shoot down the ship. He couldn’t get anyone else on-board. I think the idea was, he goes home, fuels up, and brings back ships that can carry everyone and resist human military forces.

I thought the movie was meh. Worth $6 for the fight scenes.

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Oh, "pathetic fallacy" is a term that means when the environment reflects and/or reacts to the main character's emotions. "Pathetic" because it's emotions and "fallacy" because that doesn't happen in real life. For example, it may be raining when the protagonist is depressed. In this case, the mech suit was a pathetic fallacy for the protagonist's rage. It reacts, moves, and fires its guns in a way that reflects the protagonists' emotions.

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