District 9

District 9 is a science fiction movie. It is an action movie and it is a thinly veiled allegory. Now I like allegory, but much of the time science fiction stories are dragged into unnecessarily because, well frankly like that embarrassing double-jointed aunt who comes over for Christmas and keeps showing off her ability to reach back and grab her ankles, well she's good at it despite the fact that it's obviously embarrassing for her at such an advanced age. Same thing for sci-fi allegory. It's good at taking the heavy political messages and weaving itself through them but too often the author get lost in the cool "special effects" moments and drops the proverbial ball. In short, that's what's happening here in District 9.

The set-up is that there's this ship, a huge spaceship like the one we got in the early 1980's in V: The Mini-Series, but instead of dealing with an alien plot to take over the world and a beautiful alien baddie played by Jane Badler, we get what looks like a derelict ship filled with humanoid insect creatures who have arrived malnourished and dying. Not only is there no sense of wonder at first contact, the film begins with faux-interviews with the local human inhabitants, filmed chronologically 20 years after the fact, and it is a hate-filled bigot fest. The "prawns", who have built a shanty-town below the ruined Mothership, are petty and disgusting, living short and disagreeable lives for sure, but the humans (both black and white) are even more brutish than their alien neighbors. Did I mention that the film was set in South Africa?

I get the heavy-handed analogy. The "prawns" are the interstellar immigrants, the latest challengers in an already crowded sea of competition, and the humans want them moved out, in camps away from the city, in smaller more crowded spaces so that they can live even shorter and more disagreeable lives. It's a downer of a movie for sure, but the script never gets too bogged down with the thematic skeleton and the director gives it a grimy coat of sci-fi cool action like Halo meets Mad Max meets Alien Nation.

Still, my biggest complaint of the movie isn't about the allegory, heavy handed or not, but about the set-up. When science fiction is good on the screen, it's because the writer did his homework and made the movie follow its own internal logic. See Alien, Blade Runner, god even David Lynch's Dune had a better raison d'etre. It doesn't have to be hard-science, you don't need to dot all the eyes and cross all the tees, but you shouldn't be spending too much of the movie wondering why things are happening the way they are happening in your movie. You should not be asking questions like:

What is the significance of the spaceship? Why did they come to Earth? Why are so many of the prawns barely intelligent and yet one of them is a genius with a genius in the making son? What makes him special? Why did it take 20 years to collect the space juice? If the space-juice is the ship's propellent, why did it trigger a genetic mutation? Or even: if the ship has no juice, then what's keeping it up in the sky?

There are a hundred similar questions, I could go on, but I'd say that I'm not revealing any spoilers to say that none of them were satisfactorily answered. I get that the racism is what is keeping the characters from asking these questions, that it took one character to spend 70+ hours in another man's exo-skeleton to start asking those questions, but a film has certain basic needs regardless of plot and character and thematic content. It needs to make sense. It's an exciting movie. It's made a ton of money for such a small film and my fellow geeks have raved about it, calling it the best sci-fi movie of the Millenium, which it is clearly not.