Trey, could it be possible that the black fluid is not "fuel" in the way we think of it but it is a pure version or some derivative of prawn DNA? The movie established to us that the weapons can only be activated by prawn DNA, so couldn't this apply to other forms of prawn technology such as a spacecraft? Christopher states that it took 20 years to collect that much liquid (which he could've harvested from dead prawns secretly over his incarceration).

This could also explains why after being infected by this liquid that, when injured his body begins to repair itself, it doesn't recognize this foreign DNA. Which could explain the transformation beginning with his left arm and why the transformation seems to not have a streamlined time cycle (since it only seems to noticeably changes after an injury that begins to heal).?

Just throwing it out there.

Trey wrote:

On the plus side, you're gonna love the script I'm working on now - it's about a guy who invents a new form of diesel fuel that accidentally turns him into a horse.

Only if he gets in a giant metal Trojan horse decked out with top of the line weaponry to save his horse buddies at the end.

Someone insert that Fry "Take my money!" pic here please, you have my ticket.

On the plus side, you're gonna love the script I'm working on now - it's about a guy who invents a new form of diesel fuel that accidentally turns him into a horse.

Only if he gets in a giant metal Trojan horse decked out with top of the line weaponry to save his horse buddies at the end.

This is why smart sci-fi has abandoned tropes like "space diseases" and alien/human hybrids, etc.    Humans can't cross-breed with coconut trees*, and coconut trees come from here.   And we stopped quarantining astronauts when it was decided that the odds of something from another world infecting human biology were *ahem* astronomical.    Humans can't even catch Dutch Elm disease, and we're mostly the same as elm trees, biologically speaking.

I stand by what I said.   To propose that the alien's propulsion juice just also happens to have the side effect of turning people into prawns is a plot contrivance that ignores everything we know about everything.    To chalk it up to "alien technology" is no more plausible than saying "a wizard did it".   It's mostly a good film, but that detail definitely falls into the magic bean category. 

On the plus side, you're gonna love the script I'm working on now - it's about a guy who invents a new form of diesel fuel that accidentally turns him into a horse.

* and produce offspring, obviously is what I mean.   You can do whatever you like with a coconut tree if that's your thing, but don't bother decorating the nursery, is all I'm saying.

Your guys opinion on aliens has always been (As you've expressed on multiple other commentaries) that because they are ALIEN, they will be so far beyond our comprehension or ability to understand each other. Which I agree with. But then when you guys start talking about the black alien goo that infects Vickus, you guys (And especially Trey) suddenly get hung up on the fact that it seems impossible, and that because you've never seen a human body do that beforem it obviously can't be possible. And to pull a direct quote from Trey, I think, "There is nothing on earth that can do that!"

At which point I just wanted to scream at my monitor, "Yes Trey, you're right, nothing ON EARTH can do that. Thats kinda the fucking point." It's an Alien technology that no human has ever even seen before and it suddenly infects a human. Who's to say it couldn't rapidly alter our physiology. The human body all on it's own can do some pretty fucked up shit without any alien influence.

Also, you guys were talking about the shift in style from the documentary feel to the more filmic feel. And I'm just re-watching it now and that change comes in a lot sooner than I think you think. It actually starts as soon we meet Christopher. The first shot of him with the little dude and yellow prawn digging through the garbage is the first time we jump out of the docu style. And then when we jump back to Vickus it's the docu style again, and when the lab is being raided, everything that isn't Chris is Docu style, but the close ups on Chris watching the scene are very clearly a movie shot.

So I'm sure there's a point to that, but I can't tease it out right now.

I mean, I liked it well enough. The ending made me very happy, I love the character stuff in the middle, and the opening set-up doesn't annoy me that much. I will go see Neil B's next movie, cause I think he's a good director. The movie is just 30% questions with no answers, and part of my brain is saying "they couldn't have given answers because those answers would not have made any sense in the world they created".

While it was also difficult for people living under apartheid to better their situation, it was at least possible.   And Japanese-Americans in WWII internment camps also had some options, for example they could still enlist in the military, and so on.     The prawns' situation is more like a Nazi concentration camp, there's no path to a better life available to them at all - they can only survive, if that.

It's also suggested that the prawns don't organize to use their weapons to force the humans to release them because its simply not their nature, they need their leader caste to organize them to do it, and there aren't any.  The most the worker prawns can do is act out in unfocused, disorganized ways, as seen in the news report when some rogue prawns harass humans at a gas station.

I had no problem with the prawns being so unlikable myself, that to me is what the movie is dealing with - to us they're downright disgusting and unlikable and never will be able to "blend in" to human society, so what do we do with them?    Are they worthy of any respect, should we at least try to make a place for them, or do we just warehouse them and hope they die off?  Or just call it quits and exterminate them?   

It's a tough question and the movie never offers "the answer" to it, because there may not be one.   Instead it tells a small-scale story that suggests there are still ways that humans and prawns can interact and relate to one another, because if you look close enough they do have traits that we can recognize and empathize with.  At the very least, they're intelligent beings that deserve better than what they're getting.

I've just been struck by a notion. I don't know if it holds up, I'd have to watch it again. We commented, essentially offhand, about how the film switches between documentary and narrative. It strikes me that when the film is a documentary -- i.e. when it is from the perspective of the humans -- that is when the prawns are represented as animalistic, wild, dangerous. But when the film is a narrative, not filtered through human prejudice -- which it almost always is around Christopher Johnson -- the prawns are represented as intelligent, courageous, and essentially human.

There's also a difference in how the humans are portrayed: as the long-suffering, reluctant saviors of the prawns in the documentary footage -- i.e. the way they see themselves -- and as ruthless, dispassionate monsters in the narrative -- i.e. the way they truly are.

If this holds up I wish I'd thought of it before we did the commentary, but it may be that the two "styles" actually represent the cinematic equivalent of an unreliable and a reliable narrator, side by side. Maybe the prawns in general are actually more like Christopher Johnson than the humans realize, but because we're seeing through their eyes at first, we inherit their prejudices.

I might be retconning again (Blomkamp says nothing of the sort in his director's commentary), and this is kind of off to the side of what you're talking about in your post, but that'd be fucking awesome if it lined up.

I never picked up on that either. I'm gonna watch it again and see if it holds up. I was really bothered by the fact that the film is trying to work in this racism stuff, but the characters - especially in the beginning of the film - are all these over-played caricatures. Even if your theory pays off and that's actually being done in the film, the caricatures remain when the film is dealing with the 'bad guys'. It would have been nice to have seen more intelligence coming out of the other prawns when Wikkus is in D9.

The film offers an explanation for Christopher via the theories on the prawn being drones and that there were more intelligent leader prawn that ran everything. I just assumed that Christopher was one of these higher-ranking leader prawn because the film shows us that theory. It could be that that's more human prejudice, tho, since it's only a theory.

I've just never seen a movie that deals with this sort of subject matter try so hard to make the group being repressed so unlikeable.

If they aren't actually supposed to be mindless drones, then it bothers me that they don't do something with all of the military hardware they apparently have stashed all over the place which they trade for cat food. Are they making this stuff out of trash? It seems unlikely since it's apparently some kind of bio-tech. Do they grow it? Why would the security forces who put them in D9 allow them all to keep their weapons and walking tanks and shit, especially since they apparently raid the place every other week and arrest prawn who stockpile this stuff or computer parts or what have you. And why, if they have all of these things, would they not use them to defend themselves? If the Nigerian wants to use these weapons in some attempt to become a powerful crime lord or whatever, why doesn't he just hire on some prawn to shoot the guns and run the mechs for him? He could pay them with cat food, apparently...

They could have added more of an underground organized crime aspect to the film, they could have had a prawn resistance force that was going out and attacking targets, they could have had prawn trying to work within the system to free their people, they could have had prawn trying to get jobs at McDonalds or SOMETHING. The prawn don't really do anything. They're just there to be bullied. I get that the film is really about Wikkus, but you don't see any prawn do anything that doesn't play into the apparent stereotypes these people have for them with the sole exception of Christopher. I guess it's supposed to be implied that they're all like Christopher, but Christopher doesn't do a lot of the sort of stupid shit that the other prawn seem to do. I get that it's human nature to hate things that are different or that we don't understand, but the scenario is too one-sided for me in this film. I want to see more of the prawn doing shit and trying to deal with their situation.

I mean, you say that there's not supposed to be a 1:1 correlation going on, but the prawn are living in filth and don't try to fix their situation and take it up the ass all the time and the excuse the film gives us is that they're all naive idiots and need to be lead around, yeah? But they took the situation from a real event that really happened and shot the film in a real location that actually existed. People really lived in that squalor. If Christopher is different from the rest of the prawn the way I see it, then the comparison is pretty harsh.

If the theory you have pans out and the early footage is a lens that shows us how humans see the prawn, then they should have given more examples of the prawn being more diverse.

About the monkey bot stuff, tho, you're totally right. Those things are racist as fuck. They're just the sort of racist that you see all over the place coming from lots and lots of sources. I just find it interesting that one of the guys who did the voice said he played it like the robot was just trying to acquire human-like behavior and was learning from TV and movies and shit like that, so that's how he acted. As an alien robot, they probably consider all of us to be monkeys, so making himself look more ape-like probably just made sense to him / them. As far as them being illiterate, Wheeler couldn't read the stuff, either, cause it's not their language. The twins just said that in a really stupid and racist way. Not defending or anything, just sayin'.

After all, prawns fly space in ships and black South Africans don't.

Dude, that's racist.

So calling the film racist for its portrayal of the prawns is taking the allegory too far. After all, prawns fly space in ships and black South Africans don't.

Now, while I can see the parallels the film is trying to draw, where the people are making the broad generalized statements about the aliens, about how they're all stupid violent idiots who wallow in filth and have this dangerous addiction to cat food that can get out of hand, or they're these naive morons who get taken advantage of and can't help themselves because they just don't know any better, etc. Drawing a line between those aliens and black people during apartheid I feel is just a bit insulting.

I don't think we're meant to draw any such line. Blomkamp's experience with apartheid colors the segregational nature of the film's culture, but I don't think he was in any way making -- or asking the audience to make -- a 1:1 correlation between the "prawns" and the actual African victims of apartheid.

I'm sorry, but how is that not exactly what DISTRICT 9 is about? When the aliens arrived, they were evacuated from their ship and immediately sequestered into an internment camp, where they are -- to use your own words -- restricted by law and by society. They were not given education, opportunities to better themselves, or even status as intelligent creatures. Not really, not to most of society. What is there FOR them to do, other than exist, and run around in squalor, and get high now and then?

If DISTRICT 9 is making any direct racial point, it's that racism is a vicious cycle -- if you treat people like animals, they can hardly be expected to do anything but act like animals, which only results in continuing to treat them like animals. Whatever it is we hate about the prawns, the movie seems to be saying, we're the ones who made them this way.

To me, it's not that Christopher Johnson is more acceptable because he's different from the others, in some Magic Negro stereotype way. Christopher Johnson, I think, shows that such things as courage and intelligence exist within the prawns -- fundamental to their species -- but it's been systematically driven out of most of them after decades of mistreatment.

That's true of humans, too -- regardless of race. Those traits exist within our species, but they can be beaten out of all but the strongest of us, regardless of race. The thing is, not all races have had to really endure the kind of hardship that tests the will so cruelly. Spoiler alert: "white" ain't one of them.

Christopher Johnson is the film's way of showing us that the people of Johannesburg are wrong to think of the prawns as hopeless, mindless animals -- and, in turn, that we were wrong for believing it.

...

I've just been struck by a notion. I don't know if it holds up, I'd have to watch it again. We commented, essentially offhand, about how the film switches between documentary and narrative. It strikes me that when the film is a documentary -- i.e. when it is from the perspective of the humans -- that is when the prawns are represented as animalistic, wild, dangerous. But when the film is a narrative, not filtered through human prejudice -- which it almost always is around Christopher Johnson -- the prawns are represented as intelligent, courageous, and essentially human.

There's also a difference in how the humans are portrayed: as the long-suffering, reluctant saviors of the prawns in the documentary footage -- i.e. the way they see themselves -- and as ruthless, dispassionate monsters in the narrative -- i.e. the way they truly are.

If this holds up I wish I'd thought of it before we did the commentary, but it may be that the two "styles" actually represent the cinematic equivalent of an unreliable and a reliable narrator, side by side. Maybe the prawns in general are actually more like Christopher Johnson than the humans realize, but because we're seeing through their eyes at first, we inherit their prejudices.

I might be retconning again (Blomkamp says nothing of the sort in his director's commentary), and this is kind of off to the side of what you're talking about in your post, but that'd be fucking awesome if it lined up.

See, here's the problem. How does "the average white dude" speak? You say that phrase and people might think of your average surfer dude, your average stuffy British guy, or just your average neutral West Coast dialect. The idea of "white dude" is culturally nebulous, because white people in movies, TV, etc. represent a broad range of backgrounds and cultural heritages.

You ask how "the average black dude" speaks, what pops into most peoples' heads is ebonics. Because black people aren't portrayed as being from a broad range of backgrounds and heritages, most times. Black people are portrayed as being from the 'hood. A person isn't racist for having that pop into their heads, but it is a racist stereotype that the culture might consider not enforcing so powerfully.

As to your other point, there is not a long and unfortunate historical association, made by racists, of white people with monkeys. So no, having a monkey-shaped robot talk like a surfer dude is not a racist stereotype.

There is a long and unfortunate historical association, made by racists, of black people with monkeys. So yes, having a monkey-shaped robot speak ebonics is a racist stereotype.

It's not any one aspect of the twins that make them racist stereotypes -- it's that they represent a critical mass of every imaginable negative "black" stereotype in one package.

But it does bother tons of black people who aren't. I think you'll find a lot of black folks out there who loathe the fact that Tyler Perry and other stereotypes represent them in the culture.

And plus, frankly, there's always a double standard in who can say certain things and who can't. And that's not necessarily racial. For example, friends often give each other shit. You and your best friend may happily say things to each other that, if some stranger on the street walked up and said them to you, would earn him a punch in the mouth. That's because you know that there's an underlying affection when you say it, whereas the stranger's motivations may well be malicious.

In a similar way, black people addressing black stereotypes is more likely to come from a place of understanding than white people engaging in black stereotypes. Because whatever any black person says about "black people," it's tempered by the fact that they are necessarily saying it about themselves. Anything a white person says about "black people" need in no way apply to themselves, and therefore the full force of any stinging words remains.

When black people make a movie with black stereotypes, it's fairly safe to assume that the black people know that isn't all there is to black people. When white people make a movie with black stereotypes, it is in no way safe to assume that the white people know that isn't all there is to black people.

First of all, I will say that I was disappointed by District 9 is a number of ways, but it has it's good points - mainly concerning Wikkus, Christopher and his son and how their relationships evolved throughout the film. I will wait until after I get the racism stuff out of the way before I go further into the film as a whole and why it bothered me a lot, but I don't hate it or anything. After having seen it a few times, I just think it could and should have explored some of the interesting culture-clash potential. The reason the film didn't actually do that, in my opinion, was because the writer wanted to put in this allegory and some neat effects stuff instead of exploring his basic concept and taking a more interesting direction.

It's an allegory for apartheid, right? The film takes the idea of segregation and removes the human element from the equation. Instead of these things being black humans, they are a really ugly alien species. Now it's not just white humans repressing black humans, it's all of humanity repressing aliens. I think that's an interesting idea, but if you look at it in a certain way, it's really sort of insulting. These aliens are described as being lazy, shiftless idiots with no direction or motivation to better their situation. They eagerly trade everything they can find for cat food, which gets them high. They go out and steal shit to trade it for
cat food.

There's this one alien that seems intelligent enough, but the rest of them are a basically one step above wild animal.

Now, while I can see the parallels the film is trying to draw, where the people are making the broad generalized statements about the aliens, about how they're all stupid violent idiots who wallow in filth and have this dangerous addiction to cat food that can get out of hand, or they're these naive morons who get taken advantage of and can't help themselves because they just don't know any better, etc. Drawing a line between those aliens and black people during apartheid I feel is just a bit insulting.

You may as well just come out and say that most of the black people in south africa were crackheads who went around stealing shit to get their fix, and when they weren't doing that they were just being lazy and letting their living conditions become terrible because they didn't have anyone intelligent to tell them how to live. The thing about real racism and repression is that people who otherwise would go out and work and do the best they could to try to better themselves, support their families, etc can't do that because they are of a certain group and thus are restricted either by law or by society and that makes it very difficult for them to survive and prosper. These aliens don't really make any attempt to better their situation, and that comes off as a very unsympathetic trait to me and breaks a lot of the racism stuff going on. It turns them into a species of bums rather than a group that I can feel any empathy for.

Christopher just becomes "that one alien" who is different from the others, thus emphasizing how all the other aliens behave in basically the same manner. He's the one smart one, the one that seems to understand what's going on, the one that isn't apparently addicted to cat food, etc.

All of them are the same, except for this one. It's like the movie is just trying to tell me that because I identify only this one alien as being different from the others, that it is actually me who is the racist. Like "Oh, I hate most of them but this one guys is cool..." If I were to say that about black people it would be racist, because black people all behave differently because they're human. But saying that about these aliens seems to make sense to me, because they all actually do act the same.

In a way, the movie isn't really an allegory about racial injustice / equality so much as the film needed that sort of character arc for Wikkus. It wasn't really crucial to the plot or anything. you could have made the aliens quite happy on earth and well integrated, and just had Wikkus be the one asshole on the planet who hated them and he was the one in charge of some aspect of their society or whatever. You cook up some other insane reason for turning him into an alien and his character goes through the same sort of arc, and possibly causes everyone else to suddenly fear the aliens as well, making the event even more significant.

But, you know, it wouldn't have been as 'subtle' as making the film mimic apartheid.

I hope this all makes sense. My brain isn't very good at communicating ideas well with words.

As for Transformers 2 and it's supposed racism...  Making them look like monkeys could be argued as racist ,but their behavior, on the other hand, is totally not. If they didn't behave the way they do, then would the fact that they look like monkeys even matter? If the robots were voiced by white guys who just spoke the way the average white dude speaks be racist? I mean, wouldn't that imply that white people look like monkeys? That's totally racist, right?

I never got why people consider Jar Jar to be racist, either. Is it just because they have a black dude kinda swagger and talk funny to do the voice? I mean, is there some rule that says black people aren't allowed to play dumb people in any media because it would misrepresent their race as a whole? No other race I can think of has that problem. You see white guys play morons all the time. You see mexicans play morons, you see asians play morons... but a black guy plays a dumb guy or comedy relief and it's just racist?

Don't get me wrong, there's some pretty racist shit out there in films, but the transformer twins' behavior can be found in films that have entirely black casts and were written and directed by black people. Suddenly the ignorant ghetto talk is perfectly normal and OK? I mean, it doesn't seem to bother the tons of black people who are there working on the movie, right?

EDIT
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while the portrayals of the twins in T2 relies on stereotypes, you can find the same stereotypes in films that are made by black people, or for black people, or however you want to think about it. I like a lot of movies like Friday and Undercover Brother and Black Dynamite. The characters all behave in stereotypical ways and a lot of the jokes hinge on those stereotypes. I guess it's just the fact that a white guy made T2, or that the rest of the cast is largely white and they're supposed to be comedy relief, so that made it racist? Like Al Jolston making fun of black people? But if you made them human characters in a movie like Belly or Friday or Big Momma's House, they would just be another character. Hell, they'd probably seem more like straight characters when you put them next to someone like Chris Tucker or Martin Lawrence.
/EDIT

Anyway, blah on the racism stuff and back to District 9 and why it angers me:

See, I think the racism thing is a decent angle to take that story in, but I think they missed a whole lot of opportunities to add some depth to it. I think in the end they ultimately wanted to make it an action-type movie. If he had stuck with a more drama / suspense sort of plot he probably could have explored some really interesting things. The kids were a really good idea that they never explored. It bothered me that Christopher's kid didn't consider the planet he had been born on to be his home. Maybe as he had grown on earth he would have hit his teenage years and figured out that he'd been on Earth his whole life. May as well try to make it home, you know?

I would have liked to have seen the aliens here for a longer period of time and seen a couple of generations of aliens and their differences. You'd think the younger ones would be a lot more eager to try to integrate with the human society, and that would have probably made them a lot more sympathetic as characters than their parents.

I would have liked to have seen the story be more of a slice-of-life drama that just happened to be about a couple of aliens and maybe a couple of humans. The film as it is turns me off at the beginning because the characters are all totally lifeless, then it switches out of POV mode and Wikkus' plot takes over and it starts getting really really good, and then they start lining up action sequences for the last half hour of the film, and while there are some nice moments in those, the story went from interesting and unique with a couple of really great characters to genre-cliche predictable bullshit.

For what it's worth, tho, between when the characters stop being caricatures and archetypes up until Wikkus smacks Christopher over the head with that 2x4 in his shack... That's a pretty solid 45 minutes or so of great character building, great acting, great pace, pretty decent action with some nice little comedic bits and some nice dramatic moments with christopher. It's like this really awesome movie that's bookended by stuff I just didn't care for.

I didn't mean to take anyone to school or anything, but Gregory asked for specifics. It was fascinating to listen as you first played along with the film makers' game (these aren't humans but they are totally equal to humans) and then tore it apart (maybe they're caste-bound creatures; we don't know). You'll notice that in my comments, I was always playing along with the film makers, but I recognize that it's perfectly valid not to.

Where in Indiana, Zarban? I used to live north of Indy.

I think you hit an important and overlooked (by us) nail on the head there, we really wouldn't have anything to say if the filmmakers ever gave us an idea of what these people were like before they arrived.