So I Just Watched: District 9

Let's not cloud the issue with race. From a pragmatic standpoint, any human beings of substandard technological advancement could be said to NOT be a valuable resource to the collective planet. Certainly nowhere near as valuable as greatly advanced technologies would be. Indeed, from a historical viewpoint I believe more often than not that a more advanced civilisation would be prone to push aside/kill/exploit the less advanced people and take their land, which would be the real valuable resource.

The point, I'd say, is that the aliens had a valuable resource that could start wars and thus realistically the greater world powers would almost certainly have stepped in and handled the situation to keep it from getting out of hand. I guess the movie was trying so hard to be a thought-provoking metaphor that such considerations fell to the wayside.

Or it might have been thought-provoking if it was worth caring about. But given how irredeemably monstrous humanity is presented, who cares if they are wiped off the face of the planet. Hell, at that point everything in the universe could have died and I would have been downright apathetic about it.

You're assuming the gap between the prawns and the current tech is far bigger than it really is. I actually do understand it quite well. Given your example of giving an Iphone to people 500 years ago, yes they couldn't do too much with it since they lack all reagents and tools to construct it, and even if someone did understand how it worked, all hardware to make it work wont exist for hundreds of years. To them it might as well be magical, since that's about how well they'd understand it initially.

In theory there could be something in the prawns tech would could not make at this current time, but the fact is there's plenty of it to analyze and understand. Given how rapidly our tech is advancing I'd give them 200-300 years on us tops. It's simply ahead of us but by no means beyond us.We for most part have less advanced versions of everything they have. We have the tools to manufacture any materials the stuff is made out of for most part. At very worst case scenario humans would be making knock off tech till the rest of the mystery unraveled itself.

Not true, as they would operate stuff more than likely for a field test if you paid them to. They were more than willing give us their junk for cat food.

Not to mention there was likely others like Chris aboard the ship given there was millions of them. All takes is one Prawn to be the golden goose. They had plenty of time to weed them out and find ones with talents.

All that seem be was a lock out device. (unless there's actually something in the Prawns that powers the devices, which at that point you'd just extract said fluid, and break down the components and mass produce it.) In reality that wouldn't be hard to bypass at all. Any machine can be tricked into tripping the on switch. If you know anything about electronics and machines you'd know that.

I'm from the USA, and know how to communicate in English just fine. I'd ran my posts through spell check if I knew you were going to try to cite that as a point. In the heat of the moment I rant and make mistakes. I'm usually lax about errors.

Completely false. District 9 actually has less realism in it(such as government agents don't change security codes , while Bay actually pays a huge amount of detail to real life operations and methods in his movies. There's tons of accuracy to them as someone who's been in the air force.) and lower quality story telling. You don't need know any history to follow district 9. Sure Apartheid happened, and it supposed happened during the 80s, but the film makes no references to that line frame. No cold war, nada.

You're just making a straw man argument. Invalidating me won't invalidate my points.

Tenzhi gets it.

That's pretty much it.


Go ahead and try. I just posted a brief idea because I didn't think was really required for me break down every last detail of the scenario because I assumed you could connect the dots.(and would be really off topic.) I clearly overestimated you. You wanna talk down to me, don't pull cop outs, actually say something. You keep insisting I don't know what I'm saying but you offer nothing in return.

If you see potentially dumping oil into the ocean as the same risk as having aliens bomb us into the stone age....then you really just don't understand. This is much bigger than that. Those two things aren't even on the same scale. Like comparing a pebble to a mountain. They re both rock, but that's what the similarities end.

Not to mention the reason people did those things was profit. District 9 was squandering the chance make profit. Anyone that cutthroat wouldn't have set up a camp and stopped there. They wouldn't have allowed gangsters to roam their potential goldmine.

Technology is extremely valuable. If you saw the story awhile back, there was a huge deal over the new Iphone getting leaked. A website bought it off someone who found it in a bar, and had a whole ordeal with apple. This is just a new version of an existing phone.

People are willing go to war over oil, you think that the world's super powers would just sit idly by and let south Africa blow a once in a lifetime chance at new tech? Which South Africa was horribly running district 9, you can't say they weren't. How are we supposed to believe this sort of foolishness would be tolerated? It's not because the US or the UN are just that good of guys. No ,because of profit which you've already said yourself the lengths people will go for it. Your points reinforce mine. That's exactly why district 9 doesn't work. Greedy suits would had someone invade take the place over, and lock it down. That's all there is to it.

Why movies shows bases like area 51, because the governments of the world don't mess around with top secret tech. I know because I was in the air force and they had in my manual to bust anyone's head with my wrench if they came near my plane if there was nukes on it. Deadly serious business. There's no room for crap like district 9 to happen.

Go and enjoy it. It's your time and life. I'd rather watch something mindless that was atleast honest with what it was and not pretentious about it.

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.

Interesting viewpoint. And completely in the minority(not to mention completely insane in my own humble opinion). I'm not saying you're not entitled to your opinion, but I think you need to understand that you are in the vast minority here.

RottenTomato has Disctrict 9 at 91%
Battlefield Earth is an amazing 2%(and is also considered one of the worst films of all time).

IMDb:
District 9----8.3(out of 10)
Battlefield Earth-2.3(out of 10)

Metacritic:
District 9-----score of 81
Battlefield Earth-------9

Battlefield Earth was nowhere close to awesomely bad in a good way. Hey, I love 'B' movies. You did use the proper word though in describing it....dreck.

Best theory I've heard is that the 'fuel' was general-purpose nanotech sludge that the shuttle needed to fly. When it wasn't contained and directed by a machine the nanites performed a default operation, which apparently was medical. They analyzed Wikus and tried to 'fix' him.