District 9 Aftermath: What sci-fi flick got it all (read: mostly) right?

Movies
21

Yeah, I do mean those critical. Should not be using ‘critics’ interchangeably, huh?

Gattica is an excellent example that I could not recall. The Prestige and similar films I guess I put into more of a fantasy genre, but that is more my subconcious choice of pigeonholing films set prior to present day as Fantasy and others as Sci-Fi. Best part of The Prestige is Bale’s trick with his wedding ring on his fingers. That is hard as hell to do. I have been practicing that now and then since I saw it. Almost dropped my ring down a floor drain once. I wonder how long it took him to do that so effortlessly…digressing…

I had never heard of Man from Earth. The premisesounds very interesting.

Sorry to ignore you other folks…Tom always seems to poke at something I want to clear up immediately because of his evil requirement for better phrasing, which is admittedly a shortfall of mine on message boards. So I clear it up and then shake my virtual fist at him. (Only kidding, you write for a living, it is your nature. I do figgerin’ and it is my nature to ignore things that do not include numbers)

@Rywill: Some of the sci-fi tropes you mention, I tried to accept a while ago. A necessary evil of making a film manageable and easier to process for viewers. I watched few clips and read nothing prior to District 9. The one clip I watched led me to think the Prawns were actually some android/robot alien life form. Then when they came on and I saw they were just another human/alien hybrid, I did get a twinge of that old nagging irritation, “Jeez, this again?” I do have little dissapointments here and there, but I find that if I dwell on those, they remain at the forefront of the memory of movies and I remember the films themselves less fondly.

My line drawing is most likely wasy too forgiving at times. May be related to wanting to enjoy a film at all costs since I get to see fewer. I was one of 3 who enjoyed The Perfect Getaway, FFS.

@Marged: I have a need for a more iron clad and believable story, but then when I get it with Hard Science, I am invariably let down. I pick up those books and am ready for the immersion and then my brain quits on me. Greg Bear (Darwin’s Radio for one) has worked for me, but I am not sure wear he falls on the Hard Science scale of Scienciness.

@Hugin: I think the thing is, the dudes that make Sci-Fi films like Sci-Fi settings and technology and aliens. They also understand that a film that only revels in that may come out shallow and, in addition, they actually do want to make a more meaningful point. Maybe I need to be spoon fed meaningful stories, but I would prefer District 9 to a more traditional telling of a story of oppression/evil caste systems/racism/segregation. It makes the subject matter less depressing and more entertaining, but I am still shown a side of humanity that we like to avoid based on the very fact that it is too depressing. I admit to the selfishness where thinking about the multiple problems outside of my own are often more weighty than I can handle. As a result, I skip those films that bring those issues to light and go with something that takes me away from all of my problems (which are, generally, miniscule in comparison).

@CheesyPoof: That is pretty much my view. If they throw wacky shit in, at least have it make sense within the context of their film. I do not require it to make nearly as much sense in comparison to Real Science or the way things are handled in other films. While thin, the whole fuel thing worked for me, but we do all have different levels and requirements for believability, so if it did not work for you, I get it.

22

Movies have a limited amount of screen-time to do what they need to do from a story perspective. If the screenwriter spends an inordinate amount of time explaining why the world works the way it does, it leaves a lot less time to tell a compelling story.

Many people’s problem with D9 is that there a single object that performs 2 story functions. The filmmakers could have made these into two items, I suppose. Or had another method of moving the story in the direction it did without the use of the object, but that would have taken more time - at the expense of other elements that made the movie what it was.

I think that is the toughest job of the screenwriter - prioritizing the scenes necessary to tell the story, enlighten upon the theme, solidify characterization, keep an audience entertained, and add some humor along the way. That’s a tough job, and I’d rather them work on those elements rather than explain why x does y or to add a scene that explains why a certain plot element played the way it did.

I am able to “just roll with the story” in many cases, but of course there is a line there that is different for everyone. If in the middle of D9, Kermit the Frog popped down from the mothership and started breathing fire on everyone, I would probably have an issue with the direction the plot took. But the relatively minor oddities that people are focusing on in the other D9 thread didn’t bother me in the least.

23

See KWHit covered all the stuff I wanted to in what, 10 lines. I wrote ALL that other crap and still did not get it right. :)

24

That’s a perfectly reasonable viewpoint. Looking at the D9 thread, which had people on both sides of the fence (as well as some sitting right on the fence) as to the plausibility and/or relevance of this plot point, it’s just one of those things where reasonable minds can differ.

25

I think some movies, like Alien, get away with shortcomings because they aren’t acually Sci-fi. But people think they are, and compare real sci-fi movies to them and find the real sci-fi films lacking.

Alien is a monster movie, a horror flick. The setting has sci-fi trappings but that doesn’t make it sci-fi, anymore than the sci-fi trappings make a fantasy film like Star Wars sci-fi.

For me, the line is does the movie cross its own logic? That’s where I start to not enjoy things. For me, District 9 doesn’t, it’s true to itself all the way through.

It reminds me of Firefox. In that movie, the airplane has been established as Russian and it has some kind of futuristic thought control system. So it’s perfectly logical, in the context of that movie, that you have to think in Russian to control it. District 9 does this, it establishes early on certain things that make later events plausible, events that maybe aren’t plausible in any other context.

26

[QUOTE=TomChick;1851440]Aliens allergic to water?

…

the important question isn’t how plausible it is. The question is how well it serves the story. Although I hated some of the movies I just listed, I didn’t have the least problem with any of those issues./QUOTE]

Aliens that can span the distance between the stars but cannot invent the raincoat. And you have no problem with that?

27

Rivet counters!

…what?

28

WTF is David Spade doing in this thread?

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Aliens that can span the distance between the stars but cannot invent the raincoat. And you have no problem with that?[/QUOTE]

I do not. In a movie about faith, I’m not too concerned with the plausibility of the alien invasion plan. The dramatic function of the aliens being vulnerable to something so common as a glass of water left standing on the table worked just fine for me.

Although it’s entirely possible I just didn’t care by the time that was revealed because Signs was such a total stinker of a movie.

 -Tom
30

I am gong to go with the crowd saying the bigger picture is more important than any of the particular details. I say this, and I understand that it is grating if you’re a subject matter expert and Hollywood does a film in your area of expertise. It’s just hard to set it aside long enough to evaluate the story.

The other side of this is, if you’ve ever been in a writer’s group, it’s like when the fantasy writer wants to explain to you the exact nature of the elves and the dwarfs in her story, as opposed to all the other stories out there, and she goes on and on, and there is absolutely no story, no narrative, just detail after detail about the elves and the dwarfs. Or another example might be a guy writing non-fiction and it all seems incredibly implausible and his only defense is BUT IT REALLY HAPPENED! Who cares? If it seems implausible, it probably means there isn’t a good narrative to hang those actual events on, so it’s just a list of facts, each of which might be totally bad ass as a fact, but together they do not really make up a story.

31

Who is this? Seems like a familiar face, but I can’t place it.

32

It’s Martin Starr - he was in Freaks and Geeks (one of the geeks) and that picture is from Party Down.

33

Thank you Marged! Sometimes I think that Quarter to 3 is all that stands between me and an immense generation gap of cultural flotsam and jetsam.

34

I live to serve! If you’ve watched Freaks and Geeks, seeing him in Party Down is slightly disorienting, because he looks like all of him just got… longer.

35

In Party Down he’s a jerk of a nerd all the most loathsome nerdy qualities. Like all of us! But most especially when he’s furious at a porn star for liking dragons.

36

True. Kind of, IMO.

Sci fi is more about setting than a real genre description. Or more accurately, it doesn’t tell you what kind of story you’re about to see. You can have a monster in the house story like Alien, or a Quest story like Star Wars, or a Man with a Problem story like D9. And each of those stories have important elements that require certain conventions that are more similar to each other (even outside of sci fi) than sci-fi stories in general have with each other.

Star wars is more like Lord of the Rings or Saving private Ryan than it is District 9. D9 is more like The Man Who Knew Too Much as it is about a man who is transformed by a somewhat random event and thrust into a life or death adventure. The story is in what he does to get himself out of it. And the change that journey makes in him (literally and figuratively).

37

I’d say a somewhat arbitrary definition of sci-fi could be; feasible if outlandish predictions about future cultures and technology which are necessary for the storyline to work.

H.G. Wells is the perfect exemplar of Sci-Fi. His stories were built upon what was, at the time, a very methodical and rational premise, which elaborated upon as the story unfolded some political or social ill of his time. In War of the Worlds, the aliens in all their myriad actions seemed perfectly consistent with an industrial age conceptualization of technology. They were propelled into space by a giant gun, they were shriveled helpless bloated sacks that lived off pure blood because their digestive organs had atrophied away (the concept of vestigial organs taking hold during Wells’ time), they conceived strange walking machines that used no wheels (the wheel never having been invented by them), that fired poison gas canisters anywhere artillery might be hiding and use a strange furnace-like heat gun to burn everything else. There were no weird invulnerability shields, and the aliens suffered a few random casualties by ramming them with ships. And they died out because, evidently, there were no microorganisms from where they came. And all this was fit into a story where the (as it seems) unduly proud English gentlemen is faced with the inhumanity of man as society collapses around him.

The problem with the canister-into-alien plot device is that it’s not internally or externally consistent, but is an arbitrary and unforeseen necessity in order to further the plot. And so, basically, is crappy Sci-Fi. The Aliens all dying at the end of War of the Worlds is completely unforeseen but not arbitrary - the reader is supposed to become acutely aware of the how these small pests which cause so much disease to humanity could actually be a blessing in disguise, if only we had the wisdom to see them as such. The man turning into an alien is neither a warning, nor an inevitable result, or anything else. It’s the joker falling into a vat of acid, or (in this case) an Afrikaner falling into a vat of black paint.

38

There are a few some stories you know you won’t be seeing, though – say, a Hugh Grant romcom, or a Lifetime disease-of-the-week style tearjerker.

39

It’s been a LONG time since I saw it, but I bet one could make a case for Enemy Mine being basically a romcom (or more accurately, a Buddy Picture, which is ultimately the same thing).

40

I think an important part of what makes a sci-fi story sci-fi is that you can’t take the sci-fi element out of it and have the same story.

In Alien, you have a monster chasing people. That it takes place in the future, in space, on a spaceship- that’s all irrelevant to the story. This story could take place in Antarctica…in fact it did and was called The Thing.

In District 9 the entire story rests on the sci-fi elements. Refugees/immigrants flood your country and you don’t like it? Send them back where they came from. Aha! Except what if you can’t, since they came from space? You have this story.

edit:

I think that by establishing a biological connection between the aliens and their weapons, the filmmakers did their part in securing internal logic. The aliens have tied themselves to their tech organically. The funny this is, this concept isn’t even alien when you think about it. How many human cultures have had their warriors eating certain portions of their victims/prey, thinking that they’ll absorb their powers or somesuch?

How they use that concept is up to the filmmakers. In this case they used it to justify turning a guy into a prawn, which in the context of the character(racist bastard) is pretty damn good in a karma sort of way. What goes around comes around, that kind of thing. There WAS a point, in other words.