District 9 Rises From the Ashes of Halo

JohnSmedley sent in a story about what might be the last SciFi film worth caring about this summer. He writes "Wired has an interesting piece up on the upcoming District 9 release. District 9 rose from the ashes of a failed Halo movie and expands on 'Alive in Jo'Burg' which is a South African short film by Blomkamp. Both the short and full feature films expand and explore a premise in which aliens in space are treated as badly as illegal immigrants and the underclass. The story begins as a damaged alien craft lands in Africa. The foreign race is quarantined in a remote area called District 9, and from there are subjected to xenophobia, and the desire of a multi-national conglomerate to steal their technology. The film is an exploration of what would happen in terms of segregation between an alien race and humans, subjecting the stranded visitors to the very human condition of greed, fear, and exploitation. District 9 will be in theatres on August 14'th, and you can view the trailers from the viewpoint of Multi-National United."

Moon

[u38cg]

Another fantastic sci-fi piece recently released is Moon, directed by one Duncan Jones. Strongly recommend it, if you can find it - it's been reasonably widely released in Britain, not sure about the US and the rest of the world.

Re:Alien Nation

[Anonymusing]

That was my first thought. Actually, I thought of the Alien Nation [imdb.com] movie, which I thought was even better than the series. "Your mother mates out of season!"

Re:It's just the opening scenes of Alien Nation

[Jugalator]

At least these aliens are slightly more alien, but they're still bipedal oxygen breathers with bilateral symmetry.

FWIW, it took evolution billions of years to come up with that this is a very efficient way of moving intelligent beings with use of free appendages (arms + hands) around a solid earth crust with an oxygen atmosphere. I'm not so sure this is a "one in hundreds" of potentially useful evolutionary ideas, but rather one in very few. That it's symmetric comes from cellular division, and there is so far little supporting evidence that alternative mechanisms can support a two meter tall intelligent organism well.

Re:That May Work as a South Africa Satire

[Fieryphoenix]

You can state, but that doesn't make you entirely correct. You do so have constitutional rights. The only constitutional rights you lack are the ones specifically granted citizens such as voting rights, or people born here, such as eligibility to be president, or a few age requirements. Everything else in there which applies to "the people" applies to you. Quoting the ACLU for examples because it's much easier than compiling myself:

"every person in the United States has the right to due process and equal protection; to criminal proceedings that afford a right to counsel, a jury trial and freedom from double jeopardy; to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment; to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and to freedom of speech, religion and association."

Re:Moon

[yincrash]

In case anyone doesn't know, the one Duncan Jones is the son of the one David Bowie.

I saw the movie at the Tribeca Film Festival followed by a question and answer with him. It's a fantastic scifi feature for a directorial debut. I hope he continues making more films in the future.

Re:That May Work as a South Africa Satire

[Tangent128]

The fuss back then was that British citizens were not given representation.

A Green Card holder is still a citizen of another country, and is thus denied a vote on the basis of national sovereignty.

Re:Interesting parallels

[krou]

Even though there are obviously parallels with Apartheid, I think there are much closer parallels to the recent and growing xenophobia against immigrants (illegal or not) in South Africa. Incidentally, there's a good interview with Blomkamp here [slashfilm.com] where he notes that both of these played crucial roles in the film. He also mentions that in the first week of filming, the recent xenophobic riots took place where people were murdered and burnt alive etc. Alive in Jo'Burg was also clearly influenced by xenophobia.

Re:Moon

[caitsith01]

To me the point is that we need to make sure things never get to that point in the first place. Because once a ruthless and totalitarian system in place, it is impossible to resist from within. See : present North Korea, Nazi occupied France, Saddam's Iraq, etc ...

Precisely. Orwell is telling us that the time to fight the totalitarian state is before it assumes power, not after, because we are reaching a point technologically where it will no longer be possible to fight it after it takes power. So instead of depressing us, 1984 should galvanize us to stop anything similar from ever arising.

Meanwhile we happily let our elected 'representatives' permit total surveillance, secret police, torture, free speech zones, unexplained foreign wars, state-sponsored corporations...