Zubenelgenubi

No, you need EDT, or Eastern Daylight Time, since most of the country is on Daylight Savings Time right now.

Or just say "eastern" or "pacific" - then you don't have to worry about it.

I also had this problem. The mission is in Ouro red-side, but it was marked as complete for me as well. And given that I was playing my BLASTER, I know for a fact that I had not done it before.

I can verify that this happened to me. Took him down as a Vigilante, no badge. Went full villain, got the badge.

this.

Oh, I agree.

The elephant in this case being that in just one slow quarter they made enough money to cover salaries. Conservatively another quarter's revenue to cover all other expenses, leaving at least half the year's income as pure profit. So that's what, around $6 million in profit for the year?

Yeah we better shut er down. $6 million isn't nearly enough money!

Oh sure. I knew that. But that in no way excuses the breast-milk scene.

Once she passes the potty-training hurtle, it's all golden for about the next 10 years. After that...

Ponyo was pretty, but bizarre.

A fish changes into a little girl for no explainable reason. (Yes, she got into the room and drank the potion, but even before that she’d grown legs and her “father” remarked on how powerful she was getting. Why? How? “OOOhhh… lookit the pretty fishies!”) Because a fish changed into a girl, the Moon is about to crash into the Earth and prehistoric fish appear in the ocean. (ummm… what?) At one point, after the entire island is flooded by the new lunar tides the boy (who’d been abandoned by his mother at home) and the fish-girl meet a young couple in a boat. In spite of having lost everything they own and the impending End of the World, the couple is cheerful and happy and engage in a long conversation about breast milk. Then the mother of the little boy decides to arrange a marriage between her son and the fish, and this makes everything alllll better. Oh, and the eponymous fish-girl’s entire personality can be summed up in two sentences: “Ponyo loves ham!” “Ponyo loves Sutsuke!”

[mrhorse]
“No Sir, I didn’t like it.”
[/mrhorse]

What a wonderful philosophy you have...

"Shut the hell up, all of you."

<-- (not a mod)

Then you would do yourself a favor to by not saying things like “No district 9 is poorly put together as your post" to other people. Normally I don't go there in a discussion like this, but your grammar really was so bad that half the time I had no idea what you were talking about. Just remember that you played that card and I merely responded to it. But your last post was a lot better so thank you for that.


Heh. One of your criticisms of the film is that it left too much unsaid, but here you're telling me that I should be able to “connect the dots” on this preposterous “brief idea” of yours. Well then, I'll give you what you asked for. Here is your brief idea:

First of all, this isn't a superman comic book but an attempt at thought-provoking SciFi that gets as many details right as it can while going to the Suspension of Disbelief Well only when needed to get the message across. Planets cannot just “explode.” In order for this to happen each piece of the planet would need to be lifted out of the gravity well with sufficient speed to achieve escape velocity.

Using Earth as an example (your alien miles may vary):
Escape velocity here is 11.2 km/sec, or about mach 32.
The mass of the Earth is 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg.
The amount of energy necessary to impart that much speed onto that much mass would require the entire energy output of the Sun for several hours. (The Sun releases the energy of roughly 9 billion thermonuclear bombs each second.)
To put it another way, it would require a ball of U-235 approximately 84 miles in diameter to make a bomb out of.

But what the heck, let's posit some sort of anti-matter rogue moon crashing into the prawn's homeworld or something (“But Zube, where will you get that much antimatter in the current macroscopic universe?” “Never mind. Maybe the Decepticons made it.”). So the prawn planet blows up and a chunk of it the size of an asteroid goes flying away at tens of times the speed of sound, carrying away a bunch of prawns...

...who are now smeared across the leading surface of the asteroid as a thin organic paste, thanks to the mind-numbing millions of g-forces involved in accelerating this bit of the planet up to that tremendous speed.

But what the heck, let's posit that the prawns have adamantium exo-skeletons that can survive such accelerations (“But Zube, then their internal organs would just tear loose and pool into their feet.” “Shut up, you!”). SOMEhow a bunch of prawns survive and are now standing on an asteroid that was once a piece of their homeworld. So what are they going to breathe at this time? An asteroid doesn't have sufficient gravity to hold onto an atmosphere (not that any atmosphere could stick around given the g-forces).

But what the heck, lets posit a domed city on a piece of the homeworld that miraculously survives the explosion without cracking the dome, and without everyone and everything inside being crushed by the appalling g-forces involved. Now we have an inhabited asteroid in orbit around their home star, and not going anywhere. This is because escape velocity from the prawn's STAR needs to be overcome also, otherwise the asteroid could never reach Earth. Again using our own solar system as a rough example, the solar system escape velocity from the Earth's orbital position is 42 km/second, or nearly 4 times the speed needed for the asteroid to come out of the planet's explosion in the first place.

Actually, we catch a bit of a break here, because we can imagine gravitational perturbations from other hypothetical planets in the prawn's home system. Jupiter (again for example) influences asteroids in our neck of the woods and often (in cosmic terms) imparts enough gravitational slingshot energy to kick them out and away. So we can imaging this happening to the surviving prawn's asteroid. Eventually gravitational interactions impart enough kinetic energy to reach their star's escape velocity. Oh, by the way, this process will take tens of millions of years.

But what the heck, let's posit that the prawns will survive on their shattered asteroid for tens of millions of years (and not evolve into something else, and not die off, and be able to grow food, and maintain a stable biosphere...). Once their asteroid leaves its solar system, they will need hundreds of millions of years of time in which to cross inter-stellar space. There is still the issue of the vast, vast emptiness of space, and no particular reason why the asteroid would ever come close to any other star at all, let along one with a habitable planet.

But what the heck. Let's posit that they have some way to steer the asteroid (“But Zube, that would mean throwing away almost all of the asteroid itself as reaction mass, and where would they get the energy to do that?” “I'm warning you....”). Once away from their star they will need an energy source for growing their food. Where will it come from? (“Told you so!” SMACK “OW!”)

And didn't your brief idea say they lacked tech? The technology needed to survive an exploding planet and hundreds of millions of years in inter-stellar space and being able to find and steer toward a habitable planet makes your brief idea internally inconsistent.

You know what, let's skip the potential problems they have in beep space and just move on.

So now we fast-forward a few hundreds of millions of years and find our prawns on an asteroid hurtling into our own inner solar system. Remember that solar escape velocity I mentioned before? Well, conservation of energy means that it all has to come back if an object is moving into the solar system from outside. Essentially, the asteroid's potential energy of position will become kinetic energy as it moves down into the Sun's gravity well. (This, by the way, is how we know that nothing has ever been identified as coming into our solar system from inter-stellar space. Anything that did would be moving very, very fast and thus would give away its origin.) Therefore, when the prawn's asteroid reaches the Earth's position, it will be moving at about 42 km/sec.

Calculating the release of energy when this sucker hits the Earth would require knowing the mass of the asteroid. But given this sort of speed the mass is almost trivial since K.E. = ½ mV^2 (the velocity is the much more important part). When the asteroid impacts Earth, it will release billions (more like hundreds of billions) of times the energy contained in all the world's nuclear weapons.

Now we can start our movie. Oh wait, the prawns have all been vaporized in a fraction of a second. No worries, Now we have a “desperate survival of the human race” film, as the earth is now ******. Well, actually, it would be a very short film. The remaining atmosphere would be a super-heated mixture of vaporized rock and steam. The only life left on our planet would be bacteria living several miles below the surface.

...So how is that analysis? Did I miss anything?
(Remember, you asked for this.)


But having said all that, I will suggest that we circle back to the pertinent topic at hand.

As near as I can tell, your objection to the film breaks down as follows:

(1) You are not prepared to swallow the suspension of disbelief necessary to allow the prawns to sit in South Africa without intervention by the United States and other superpowers.

(2) You think that after 30 years the humans would have been able to reverse-engineer the prawn technology, or at least be able to use it and make money off of it.

(3) You think that the humans would be treating the prawns better, based on the possibility of hypothetical future retribution should other prawns come to Earth.


Actually, I rather agree with you on point (1). This is the weakest premise of the film. But it was also necessary for the setting to be where it was in order for the metaphor to work.

For (2) I believe you are entirely off-base, for reasons which I've already discussed. Your only response was to just say, “We would be able to do it.” So I will simply respond with “No, we would not.”

And (3) is the very heart of the film. Without this there wouldn't be the message and the metaphor. In addition to the Apartheid message, the film also points out the stupidity of short-sighted humans and governments and how complacent we can be in the face of possible severe consequences of our current actions (the examples I gave where this really does happen were global warming, the banking melt-down, and the gulf oil spill). Your only counter argument mentioned the oil spill. Sorry, but the potential consequences of global warming far, far outstrip the other two examples I gave. It's not surprising that this is the one you ignored. Your objection to the treatment of the prawns is essentially to say, “Dear God... why can't they see what will happen if they keep this up?” My answer to that is, “Yes, exactly right. WHY can't they see?” I said this sort of thing in real life to my wife before the housing bubble burst, and I'm still saying it with regard to the global warming deniers and the insane lack of action on the part of the entire world in the face of the possible collapse of our biosphere. The potential consequences of that are every bit as severe as a bunch of pissed-off aliens. And yet we do mostly nothing.

All of this really shows how little you understand about how technology works.

The alien technology is at least several hundred, more like several thousand years more advanced than ours. Here's a thought experiment: Go back in time 500 years and give an iPad to the Europeans. Heck, give them a whole box. See how much progress they can make in “rip[ing] it apart and figuring out how it works” in 30 years. Remembering, of course, that the Europeans have no electricity, no plastics, no optics, no concept of the microchip, no quantum mechanics, not even Copernicus, Galileo, or Newton at this time. There wouldn't even be a concept of DATA as such. And remember that an iPad is at least made by HUMANS for other HUMANS to use. Sure, they'll have a factory set up to crank out knock-offs after 15 years or so. Sure they will.

And the prawns in the camp were all of very low intelligence. They would have been of no help at all in deducing the scientific principles of the technology.

Oh yes, and the stuff doesn't even work unless you're a prawn.

The bit here is very much like your bizarre idea about aliens arriving on Earth by clinging onto an asteroid which was a piece of an exploded planet. Sorry, but your knowledge of basic science is obviously lacking. Because of that you proceed from misconceptions that will not serve in the case of an intelligent SciFi film that tries to get the basic science premises correct.

For someone who makes the sort of spelling and grammar atrocities that you do, I'd be careful saying things like that. It appears that you are a non-native English speaker. This is fine, of course. I mean no disrespect toward your language of origin. Just don't throw stones like that when your own house is made of very thin glass. My post was fine. You just refuse to acknowledge any point that disagrees with you.


A bias toward the empty eye-candy deck that is Transformers is totally relevant. One film is full of mindless crap spoon-fed to the audience, the other requires a bit of thinking, some knowledge of history, and the filling in of blanks. That your bias is toward the former rather than the latter is very telling.


Black South Africans weren't valuable to the collective planet? Let me be sure I understand you. Black. People. In South Africa. Weren't. Valuable. Under. Apartheid.

*headdesk*

TELL ME that what you REALLY meant was lost in translation! Please!


You have got to be kidding. There is soooo much incredibly wrong with this concept that I hardly know where to start. I'll just say that District 9 was intended to be intelligent SciFi and leave it at that.


My examples were of human beings collectively doing short-sighted, stupid things for petty short-term reasons, while ignoring the potential long-term harm that can come of them. You did not refute any of them. In fact, I cannot decipher this paragraph of yours at all.


The rest of your post is nothing but variations on the theme of, “Other aliens like the ones in this film could come along and kill us all if they wanted to, so we need to be careful how we treat these.”

I already addressed this in my examples of short-sighted human behavior. But I will also add that this is precisely what makes the metaphor work (heavy-handed as it is). At the end of the film, the audience is left wondering “What will happen if/when Chris gets to where he is going? What will the other aliens do about our treatment of these on Earth?” This is the “thought provoking” part that I mentioned before. The idea that a seemingly stupid, useless, and easily manipulated minority might some day turn tables on their oppressors is exactly what happened in South Africa.


Again, you are perfectly free to dislike the film. You're free to say why. What I object to is your dogmatic way of stating it as if it's blatantly self-apparent like the law of gravity.

And I actually agree with some of your criticisms. For example, the way the control pod went undetected for so long. And yes, all the humans in the film are nasty, petty, and awful. It has its flaws, but few films are perfect. But I enjoyed it and bought it on Blu-Ray. I find it compelling. My opinion, not a self-apparent fact.

It's arrogant in the extreme to make a dogmatic statement like that, “there's nothing to debate.” Sorry, but you are not the final arbiter of all things film. In fact, your support of Transformers shows just how far from an expert you really are.

You're entitled to your opinion, but don't try to ram it down everyone's throats as more than just your opinion.


This was clearly explained. You're either not remembering it correctly or not wanting to see it. They very clearly stated that when the ship arrived a smaller piece detached and came away, but it was not noticed at the time. It was only spotted several days later after analyzing a single grainy film shot from miles away. The “whole freaking world” was not watching a random spot a few miles away from the capital city of a small African nation. Not until the ship was there would anyone have cared. The ship was far away from downtown, nobody was expecting it, and everyone at the time kinda had a lot on their minds. It all happened fast and by the time everyone reacted, the pod was already gone. There you go.

Now I too found it a bit of a stretch that the pod remained hidden in the middle of the camp for many years, but that is a far cry from saying “there was no explanation.” There was, and they provided it. Watch it again if you don't recall.


This paragraph is hard to follow, but I think you're saying that the World's superpowers wouldn't allow South Africa to control the Prawns, and that everyone would be afraid of the dire consequences if other aliens came and were upset about our abuse of them. Therefore we would treat them better.

Perhaps. But you're forgetting two things: Metaphor and Suspension of Disbelief.

The entire film is a metaphor for Apartheid. It's really heavy-handed as these things go, in my opinion, but metaphor it is. The suspension of disbelief is necessary for the metaphor to work. Sure, it's not realistic, but so what? It's SCIENCE FICTION. In science fiction we accept warp drive, transporters, aliens who want/could mate with humans, (or any aliens at all for that matter), anti-gravity, time travel, superheroes, and yes, even absurd giant transforming robots. The best science fiction is that which makes one think. It's not that which has the most realistic scenarios. You're willing to accept giant transforming alien robots in one film, but not world governments respecting national boarders in another? Hum.


As for the treatment of the prawns, in one sense I found that the most realistic part of the film. They look really weird, and they're all really stupid (except for Chris who was a different caste). Humans look down on weird humans and treat them badly. Why wouldn't we do the same to apparently useless and stupid aliens that eat cat food and chew on tires? Because at some nebulous time frame in the future something bad might happen because of it? Sorry, but short-sighted governments don't think that way. Global warming, the risks of deep-ocean drilling, and the clear danger of insane banking gambles are obvious recent examples.

And the film even talked about this as well, right at the start. “There were a million of them. We put them in a temporary camp. Before we knew it the camp was permanent. And then it was a slum.” The humans were overwhelmed, and stuff just happened, and then everyone became complacent. This sounds like a very likely scenario to me.


Opinion once again. One clearly not universally shared. If you said, “Showgirls sucked” or “Catwoman sucked” or “Battlefield Earth sucked” you would get more of a universal consensus. Here, not so much.



And regarding the unlikeability of the main character, I thought that was actually pretty cool. He was a schmuck thrust into a world-shaking situation. Why would someone in such a position have to be a handsome, noble, a$$-kicking heroic figure with chiseled features and cool hair? No reason at all.

And did anyone else sense the tiny sub-plot of the guy's Father-in-law setting him up to fail? The camp evacuation was doomed to become a blood-soaked fiasco. Therefore, the leader of the relocation was going to end up a scape-goat (especially since he commanded no respect or authority from the security forces, and therefore could not control them). He was clearly in waaaay over his head, and that would have been apparent to his father-in-law before even assigning him the job. So why did he do it? My guess is that the father-in-law felt that his daughter had married beneath her (she being such a hawt bombshell and her husband a funny-looking milquetoast). So it may have been a scheme to break up his daughter's marriage.

I think very understated things like that in a film show a depth to the writing and directing. That's a far cry from “poorly made, there's nothing to debate.”


DISCLAIMER: The above is intended to be a discussion of the relative merits of the movie, and in no way a personal attack on you, Lastjustice. Just wanting to be clear.