Unauthorized Cinnamon The abortion scene was the most visceral scene in the whole movie, and I didn’t see it as over the top at all. It was perfect to show precisely how horrid the conditions the Prawns lived in were.
This post is pure gold. Nice one.
The suit’s got a built in targeting computer, and a threat recognition system, both demonstrated directly in the film. Combined together, grabbing a rocket out of the air is not beyond credulity.
If I’d inferred it, I’d have said I inferred it. If I say it was directly stated in the movie, that’s cause it’s directly stated in the movie. It was not, however, stated in the scene where he breaks free of his restraints, but rather, when he’s first brought into the lab and they begin doing experiments on him.
So, someone breaking free of a restraint is unbelievable, but doctors whipping up a cocktail of sedatives for two radically different physiologies to be used on a third physiology that’s entirely unique, with no concern for side effects, is okay? You have a strange concept of believability, man.
So, what do you expect them to do with Wikus? They’ve got a very narrow window before he turns into a Prawn completely, at which point he’s no more valuable than any other alien in District 9. How do you think they’d go about using him to develop soldiers who can actually use the alien weapons?
What do you think a tractor beam is, if not anti-gravity technology? And what do you think is holding the ship up in the air like that? This is what I was talking about earlier about bogging down a film with constant exposition drops. The only way you’ll accept this is if they shoehorn in an explanation of every function and ability of every piece of tech that shows up in the movie. It’s a ridiculous expectation to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s also something that you’ll find in every single science fiction movie ever made.
I’m sorta new here, but is it normal for a discussion about a sci-fi movie, a summer movie, or any movie to go on this long?
If not, we may have decent indication that D9 is going to be one of the most significant sci-fi movies of the decade.
Well, to be fair, the first few pages were mostly just Red Barchetta and cmyk sparring about what constitutes an official deus ex machina.
I just got back from seeing this the 2nd time and found myself cringing in suspense even though I knew what was going to happen. Cripes. (Saw it twice not because I was so desperately to see it again, but because the first time MrWhatsit was not with me, and he wanted to see it, so I went with him.)
No, this is pretty normal. If you want to see long, check out the re-write Lord of the Rings thread.
If I remember correctly, the thread on the latest Star Trek went to over 1,000 posts.
And looking over the longest CS threads, there’re a dozen or so movie threads longer than this one, including ones for Casino Royale, X2, Pirates of the Caribbean, and at least two Harry Potter movies.
Wikus being forced to shoot the prawn was the most horrifying moment for me. The look on his face…
That’s cool, but for me it was Wikus’s look and reaction during the abortion-by-fire scene that got me the most. It was like if Charlie Sheen’s character in *Platoon *had decided to take his turn raping the girl during the village raid instead of stopping those soldiers. I was completely set adrift not knowing what to identify with.
I think it was the emptiness of most of your objections and your long-windedness, actually, not the fact you did not enjoy the film that drew such a consistently rebuttal oriented reaction…
Saw it last night, so, late to the thread.
A few pages back there was discussion about tracing the phone calls, these were cell phones, and location is determined by seeing which cell tower is getting the best signal from that number, and there were large towers in the background of these scenes.
As for the RPG-7, it does have a “launch phase” and “flight phase”. The launch, a gunpowder propellant, gets it out to about 33 feet (10m) at about 115 m/sec (377 fps, or 257 mph) after which the rocket kicks in and it speeds up. It seems the mech was further away from the launch than 10m, so he would have intercepted it at a higher speed than 377 fps, but the RoboCop auto targeting system would have helped immensely.
I liked the movie. It was interesting. That said, now that this conversation has almost fully morphed into a discussion of DEM and contrivance, I’ll comment on that, because that’s even more interesting. 
If you ask me, and indeed no one did, the real contrivance would have been to insert a scene into the movie where one of the prawns remote-controls the mech for no particular reason other than to show that they can do that.
Personally, I hate it when filmmakers do things like that.* I acknowledge that I seem to be the only one who feels this way, but I truly don’t believe they need to go out of their way to establish non-extraordinary circumstances, and it gets on my nerves when they do. If one of your characters is a Security Forces sergeant in Baghdad, I really don’t need a scene where he stops to tie his shoe and, with a slow and deliberate close-up on his foot, reveals the knife holstered in his left boot (“LOOK EVERYONE, I HAVE A KNIFE IN MY BOOT!”). He’s a military member in a combat zone. When the time comes for him to run out of ammo and pull the knife, I’ll buy that he had it, I promise. If you’re going to give him time-stopping powers, then yeah, I’ll take an expository line or two, but the knife is cool.
In short, screw Chekov’s gun if Chekov would have had a gun anyway.
The same principle applies to the mech in District 9. As others have said, we accept with no problems that this race’s technology is sufficient for interstellar travel. Yet, some of us have trouble buying that they got the radio-control thing down, without a shoehorned-in scene where a Nigerian says “Hey, it’s that robot armor! You know, I heard they can remotely control it! Did you hear me, boss? THEY CAN REMOTELY CONTROL IT!”?
Up until that point, there was no reason for Christopher or his son to remotely control the mech, and no reason for anyone to mention that it could be done. The first time they had both the ability (ie, fuel) and a reason to activate the thing remotely was when the same time that became a plot point, which was when Wikus was in danger and it could help him. That’s not a contrivance; that just makes sense. If the filmmakers had included a scene where the prawns remotely controlled something just for shits and giggles (“Hey audience! They have remote controls! Also, ballpoint pens, in case one of them has to write something down later! Can you believe it?!”), that would have been the contrivance.
Alas, I’ve been losing this fight for years, and I fully expect to continue lose it now. Nonetheless, props to Blomkamp for assuming the audience has some modicum of intelligence and reasonability.
*…almost as much as I hate the “Ah Yes, I Remember When The Movie Explained That!” flashback sequence that these days almost inevitably happens right before Chekov’s gun is fired. This movie managed to avoid doing this, too, which fact I think is responsible for a large percentage of the “PLOT HOLE!” complaints.
That’s one thing that bugs the crap out of me in the tv show Leverage. A lot of the show is about conning a mark, but in doing so they’re usually conning the audience as well. Almost every time a con is revealed, there’s a corny flashback of when that con was set up and we just didn’t know it. Sometimes that flashback is of something that happened 30 seconds ago. And it’s not like an alternate angle where more info is revealed, it’s just like they stopped the show, rewound it, played that scene again, and then skipped back to normaltime. The show’s talking down to me.
“Hey, O’Chansky, whaccha lookin at? A picture of your dame back home?”
“Nah, Rigurgio, just an instruction manual for stopping time.”
I really dont have a problem with the mech, except for why it was there in the first place. They showed the mockumentary footage of the command module coming down, it looks no bigger than a 727, when we finally do see it and yet no one sees a prawn away team digging a hole and burying it.
We have an area thats going to be sanitized by the military, who have ground penetrating radars and yet they miss the CM, possibly they did not miss it and purposely avoided looking for it, and by the by, keep a battery of rapier missiles on standby at a refugee camp.
So along with a combat mech, and not a construction mech thats been modified, Earths security forces, fail to totally quarantine the area by moving the nigerians out of the way, with all the hardware they have, they miss both weapons and weaponized tools.
The least unbelievable aspect was johnny prawn putting the combat mech into autonomous mode, when his dad was in danger.
Declan
The combat suit in autonomous mode could easily protect dad, after all it can stop bullets and shoot them back, automatically identify enemies of the prawns and eliminate them. The problem is that despite the fact that aliens have mastered interstellar travel, r/c, and ballpoint pens, the ability to have the suit really kill the baddies is seemingly eliminated when Wikus gets inside. Because it likely has an either manual or automatic mode, but no hybrid mode… or sumpthin’.
Perhaps it can be done, but Wikus just doesn’t know how to use it. If I got in a strange car, I’d know how to drive it right away but not how to enable cruise control, or even know such a thing existed.
District 9 has made $73 million dollars so far (two weekends). Granted, that’s not Star Trek money (ST made $74m opening weekend), but it’s over twice its shooting budget. Sequel probability hovers ever near 1.
Of course. But if you got into an r/c car, the cruise control could be operated remotely. Unless the r/c only works when no one is in it, cuz the interstellar travelling, bic-pen using aliens would never anticipate a scenario where operating the suit remotely would be useful if someone is in it, or somethin’. All perfectly thought through, makes absolute sense.
Your conception of DEM seems indistinguishable from “surprise” lol. You must really be miserable watching detective movies.
Hmmmmmm, a suit of armor comes to life at the very last possible second with the exact capabilities required to free our hero from the impossible situation he finds himself in. Classic Hollywood- ratchet up tension to impossibly high levels by putting hero in impossible situation, throw in suspension-of-disbelievable DEM, audience thrills ensue.