I had tried watching a few times but for some reason really struggled with the South African accents. Then tonight I watched and for some reason it worked.
So now I want to know… the liquid? What the hell is the liquid that it would turn Wikus into a Prawn AND run the ship? Fun idea, but confusing as hell.
Also… what are we supposed to take from the ready communication between Christopher and Wikus pre-transformation? Is Christopher (and other Prawns) speaking English with a super-accent, are the Prawns speaking Prawn and people English and they jsut magically understand? Huh?
And what is the explanation for why the Prawns give up their weapons and allow themselves to be so ill-treated, yet randomly kill people?
I assume I either missed something or there’s some kind of fan base that knows the back story…
In any case I liked it a lot and I hope they make a sequel.
The liquid is a Macguffin. Science today knows of no method that would turn Wikus into a Prawn, nor any way to power that ship, so it’s less of a stretch than it might be to make them the same thing. I thought it was a little weak, myself.
Some people have learned a little Prawn, some Prawns have learned a little English.
The Prawns, as I understood it, are mostly a worker caste, genetically unable to do the kinds of serious decision-making that would be required to run a ship. The few Prawns who can make decisions hide out among the others.
The movie is at least partly an anti-apartheid film in its origins, which is why it’s set in South Africa. I have to disagree with you on the sequel; I think a sequel to this would do little but tie up the loose ends in a pretty bow, which would be pretty unsatisfactory. If the Prawns come back and help Wikus and he goes back to his wife, there’s not much of a problem left.
I think an entire movie could easily be made just about mankind’s reaction to the return of the ship and the Prawn’s attempts to stop the experiments on their people.
As someone pointed out, it’s made of Liquid Unobtainium or Mcguffanoleum.
In the world of D9, the Prawns technology is somehow linked to their DNA. The mystery liquid is obviously used to power or otherwise run their devices somehow. It also has the unfortunately side effect of changing the DNA of humans who come in contact with it. It probably has no effect on Prawns.
They can understand each other’s language but to properly speak it, I would need to rip out your tongue.
Because they are refugees trapped on an alien world. When the ship landed on Earth, the Prawns were pretty much starving and helpless. They were then moved to an isolated shantytown ghetto. Sure, they can kill humans if pushed and have some pretty powerful weapons, but they aren’t invulnurable. If they start a war with the humans, they would just be exterminated.
The prawns have been living there for many many many years by the time Wikus goes around and tells them they’re being evicted and have to move. It stands to reason that there would be significant interest in both sides to learn to interpret each others language, even if they are unable to make any of the sounds necessary. Recall one scene where Wikus isn’t sure he heard the other guy correctly and asks for confirmation, and mentions something relating to the sounds the prawns make.
I’m not sure how realistic it is for them to actually be capable of learning from each other, especially when they probably have very few concepts in common. If it were another Earth-based species they’d have more common ground, but I felt it was a bit of a stretch that they worked out ways to communicate.
While the subject is revived, can someone tell me the message of the movie? I keep hearing about how it’s a great message about apartheid but… um, how? Ok, so the aliens are segregated. They’re fucking ALIENS. They have an alien mindset with a hive mind that makes them unable to operate within human society. We could give them a better place to live, but… what exactly is the message of the movie?
In the real world, the reason racism sucks is that we’re basically all the same and people shouldn’t be mistreated due to their race, and we should integrate and all act as one society. Those aliens cannot do that.
It’s an interesting movie, but all I hear is “so it’s a movie… about apartheid and stuff…” but, how, exactly? What’s the statement this movie is making?
By the time of the film they’d been on Earth 30 years. Even if they didn’t have words for “Earth concepts” when they first arrived, I think they’d need to come up with them after 30 years. Presumably a non-trivial proportion of them would be young enough not to even remember their pre-Earth lives.
The background events of the movie actually occurred, look up “Cape Town district 6.” The message, or the tie-in to apartheid, was the people who promoted apartheid and the eviction of District 6 treated the black South African population as if they were an alien species, both psychologically incomprehensible and genetically doomed to enslavement.
In other words, the aliens actually are what the apartheid regime thought that black South Africans were.
More than that, though. “Different” does not mean “alien,” and as literally alien as the prawns are, they are not “alien” in the sense that we cannot understand them. Clearly, the two species are capable of communicating with each other, and despite the dramatic differences between how human vs prawn culture operates, it’s made rather obvious that, at a base level, they value pretty much the same things we do. They are autonomous beings. They love their children. They will fight to protect their own. They can feel anger, sadness, fear, and compassion. They are people.
In other words, it’s not that the prawns cannot exist in a human society. It’s that human society immediately decided, without consulting the prawns, that* it could not co-exist with them. *We (as in the human governments of the movie + MNU) saw them as different and made little to no effort to bridge the gap, instead using our numerical and military superiority to maintain that distance as much as possible. It’s as clear an allegory for racism and oppression and you could ask for.
How do we know the aliens can’t do that? The society we see in the District is pretty dysfunctional, but it seemed clear to me that that was environmental: they’re a bunch of refugees who have been cut off entirely from their native culture, brutally oppressed, living in abject poverty with no avenue for escape, and riddled with drug addiction (the cat food). And they’ve been living like that for thirty years. You take any human population and treat them like that, and their going to end up acting like the Prawns do in the film. It’s clearly possible for them to form a higher functioning society. Hell, they build a fucking faster than light spaceship. You can’t do that if your default state is wandering around a slum in a drugged-out fog.
I’m not sure where you get the hive mind idea from. Manifestly, they do not have a hive mind. They value the individual much the same way we do: witness Christopher’s horror when he finds out about the weapon tests they’ve been performing on Prawns. They also have a complex oral language. I don’t see a species with a shared consciousness having any sort of need to evolve a spoken language.
I don’t think there’s any basis to say that it would be impossible for the aliens to integrate into human society, based on what’s shown in the movie, because the movie makes it clear that there’s never been any attempt to allow the aliens to integrate. Look at Christopher, for example: how would he not be able to function in human society, were he given the opportunity to try? And how many more aliens are there like him in the District? How many more could be like him, if they were treated like sentients, instead of animals?
I don’t see why. Certainly, there might be a barrier to understanding more abstract concepts, but if two species share a primarily oral/aural method of communication, then it should be relatively easy for them to learn at least the basics of each other’s vocabulary and grammar. Might be trickier if one species primarily communicates at a different audio frequency band, but that does not appear to be the case for these particular aliens.
On top of that, science is a universal constant, and the Prawns are a very scientifically sophisticated race, at least in their own environment. A hydrogen atom is a hydrogen atom, whether you call it “hydrogen” or “clickclick(whistle)click.” While the two species may have philosophical concepts that are mutually incomprehensible, it should only be a matter of time and effort to learn how to communicate objective, concrete subjects.
I don’t understand why people think this is a movie about apartheid. It takes place in South Africa because it’s a South African film. IOW, it takes place in South Africa for the same reason Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place in the USA.
If it was about Apartheid it would have taken place on the prawn’s homeworld and the humas would be the invaders and the minority.
If it’s “about” anything, it’s about immigration. There’s a nod to that in that one of the two sets of villains are Nigerian immigrants to SA. Really though I think its just a good story in its own right. It doesn’t need a message.
It is said in the movie, that the vast majority of the living prawns are basically worker drones, who cannot form distinct plans of action without their leader castes. Their leader castes were killed.
They are like bees without their Queen. Directionless, confused, unable to adapt except in the most rudimentary ways.
I don’t recall this being explicitly stated in the film, but I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters, so I may be forgetting something. At any rate, have biologically determined castes is not the same thing as having a hive mind.
As a general rule, I don’t really care what an artist has to say about his own work. Meaning should be determined from the work itself, not from exterior commentaries. That being said, what Blomenkamp describes in that interview, and what he portrayed in his movie, is not a hive mind, regardless of what label he wants to slap on it. The Prawns manifestly do not have a shared consciousness.
I think you’re right. He means something else, like eusocial behavior or reproductive specialization. I distinctly remember though, that it was explained, most prawns would not be capable of activating the command module.
My impression was that the Prawns were like ants or termites. They don’t have a shared consciousness, but they can’t really coordinate in any large meaningful way without some higher unseen “brain prawn” or whatever. Christopher was likely some sort of pilot. He could perform his job of piloting the ship away, but couldn’t really orchestrate anything more like a full scale rescue. It took him 20 years just to get the module working again.
Yup- But South African film making is going to be saturated in and informed by the memories of Apartheid, just as Invasion of the Body Snatchers was saturated in American fears of Communism, and couldn’t have been made somewhere else.
I do remember that bit about only Christopher being able to operate the command module, but I don’t think it was made clear if this was a function of his genetic make up, or if he was simply the only surviving Prawn to have a college education. In general, I would not take any statement made in this movie by a human about the nature of the Prawn’s society or biology at face value - particularly if the human is associated with the corporation responsible for running the District.
Going back to SenorBeef’s question, I’d say that, even if the Prawn’s biology makes it impossible for them to integrate into human society (and I don’t think we can necessarily conclude that from what we see in the movie), that doesn’t necessarily undermine an interpretation of the movie as an exploration of racism. If anything, it allows for a more complicated exploration of the issue. From a purely dramatic standpoint, the problem with racism is that it’s easy: as SenorBeef said, if we’re all equal, then we should all be treated equal, and that’s pretty much the end of the story. From that standpoint, racism is a dead issue. It’s a question that has been resolved. (Which is not to say that there aren’t other issues involved that could be explored: it’s easy to say that we should all be treated equally, but how to arrive at that outcome is still a difficult problem). By positing a population that is genuinely, demonstrably, genetically inferior to humans, we have to throw out all of our preconceptions about how to interact with them. Complicating the question is the fact that some of the population in question clearly is capable of integration: there’s no reason Christopher couldn’t function in human society, and it’s likely that he’s not entirely unique in the District. If we can justify inequal treatment of the worker caste, based on objective measures of their capabilities, how do we handle the rare, higher caste exception like Christopher? Is it fair to relegate him to the slums of District 9, simply because most of the rest of his species is incapable of a more civilized existence?