thread: 2009-08-17 : District 9
On 2009-09-05, Alex F wrote:
District 9 hit the UK this weekend.
I also found the braining of Christopher, and his subequent abandonment at the hands of the mercenaries, pretty stomach turning. It felt like a massively regressive step for the Wikus; after the inferno he had come through, you wanted him to know better. After I left the cinema, though, I reflected just what I would feel if my body was transforming, I was literally losing my own physicality and having another enforced on me, with who knows what further erosion (thought? emotion? Not only to lose my wife, but to start to view her perhaps as a predator, or foodstuff)? This is Metamorphosis, it's pretty unimaginable. In the face of that ongoing experience, I'd like to think that I would still be able to reevaluate my relationship with another species, starkly see the MNU labrooms as the Mengelian nightmare that it is, and calmly sacrifice myself to allow it to be challenged. Luckily, I won't ever be put to that test.
Contrasting that Wikus, making selfish, desperation-propelled wrong choices, with the one in the start of the film, quoting bureaucratic chapter and verse to break up a family with the deck stacked against them (litter in a refugee camp constituting dangerous surroundings? For shame.), it's the latter that still makes me shudder. That's also the one countlessly reflected in situations of power inequality over the world.
I thought it was a good film. (If Children of Men was a mango, this was a punnet of greengages.) It did feel like a film of two halves, though, with the first half of the film containing the substantive critique, such as the banality of evil of Wikus & co., and the second being playpen for all the toys that were wound up and primed in part one.
I did like the piece in the closing moments with the talking head struggling to acknowledge that one response of Christopher and the mother ship might conceivably be to wage war. You think? Perhaps not only war, but a causus belli for a just war...
