Ok so in District 9 SA gets possession of aliens and alien tech, and of course they are oppressed and put in ghettos and no attempt at befriending them and learning about their tech is made except for criminal gangs that trade CAT FOOD for this.
In Chappie they have the tech to download human minds/consciousness to a laptop and the ability to upload the consciousness to a robot body(!!!) and what do they use it for?
Piloting drone robots and a robot police force, despite having tech that would be in worldwide demand. It takes a couple criminals and a rogue employee to use it to its real potential.
Did you miss the part about how the aliens themselves don’t understand their tech because they’re basically just drones who have been bred for labor? Or how they prefer cat food to food intended for humans because, much like cats, they need taurine in their diet? Or how segregating people who are different into ghettoes and not allowing them to leave is something that actually happened in South Africa for several decades?
I watched the movie Crack In the Earth a few nights ago.
I don’t know exactly what the location was supposed to be, but given the apparent geology and the plethora of land rover vehicles, evil white scientists, and upset local black folks I’d bet money South Africa was the location.
I felt the same frustration about District 9 as the OP.
Yes, I realize this is that class of SF that uses aliens and the way we treat them as an allegory for the past political condition, but – come on. Even if the aliens didn’t understand the technology, they still knew things about it, and (as the movie shows) had access to the ships still. I really can’t believe that they’d be completely marginalized and abused as they were in that film – you’d have experts poring over every fact they could glean from them. Even if the South Africans really were morons and didn’t care, people from elsewhere would be coming in to pick their brains. They’d be luring them to their own countries with offers of decent housing. If they couldn’t do any of that, they’d sneak into the country and interview and bribe the aliens surreptitiously.
In short, I couldn’t buy the premise at all.
It didn’t help when they later pulled the “I’m turning into an alien!” ploy, even if it did liven up the film, and let the plot proceed. It was as believable as it always is, which is “not at all”.
The effects were gorgeous, and I loved the CGI non-humanoid aliens (it’d admittedly be harder to assimilate them than the attractice and humanoid aliens of the virtually pre-CGI film Alien Nation, but I can’t see it as totally impossible.)
One thing I loved was how back when they came out, people were praising this movie while condemning James Cameron’s Avatar, without realizing that both films had basically the same plot.
It’s an important point. If you have a large population of people who drove to a place in cars, most of them won’t know how to repair them in detail, but in a big population, some of them will. In District 9, at least one (probably more, although only one ids shown) know more about the ship than they were letting on at first. Any reasonable investigation would’ve tried to find out about them.
How many years did it take just to learn their language, especially considering that they lack the physical ability to speak ours and vice versa? More than enough time for “Christopher Johnson” to decide that he had best make like he’s just another worker bee and not let slip that he knows how the ship works, I suspect.
But they can operate the tech, even if they don’t know the nitty gritty behind it. Did the government even try bribing them with catfood like the gangs?
Putting the aliens up to their liking and sending in crates of cat food daily has to worth the investment even fro a purely cynical perspective.
I find myself thinking what would happen if an alien spaceship were to have a shocking stop in ANY Earth nation.
The locals would storm the thing with soldiers and war machines. The inhabitants of the spaceship would be rattled by the events, and would either surrender to the unfriendly heavily armed locals… or get shot. Assuming bullets work on these aliens, any survivors would be the ones who did not fight. Yes, there are weapons and war machines aboard the spaceship, but if the aliens were in no position to prep and use them in time, they’d get overrun quickly.
No group WANTS to be marginalized and put away in a ghetto. On the other hand, given the option of extermination, sometimes they figure submission is the better choice.
If I were in an Army base under assault by aliens… well, I am not a soldier. I sure wouldn’t want to have to charge into the armory and figure out real fast how an assault rifle works, where the ammo is kept, and how to arm, load, and use the thing in a hurry. And that goes quadruple for a tank.