It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been to my blog before and seen my sci-fi novella or my tech poems that I enjoy science fiction. However, I rarely see many sci-fi movies, if for no other reason than I’d rather spend my time playing games and reading science fiction books. However, today is Labor Day and I had some spare time on my hands, so when my buddy Shawn invited me to go see District 9 with him, I quickly agreed.

I’m not sure if I enjoyed the movie or not, but I have some things I’d like to say about it. A few caveats: I don’t want to explain the plot of the movie, or worry about avoiding spoilers, so this post assumes you’ve already seen the movie or don’t care and don’t intend to see it.

District 9 takes a number of risks for a big-budget film, and for that I applaud it. The hero of the story is not a know-it-all scientist or a gun-toting action hero, but instead, a pansy minor administrator. This was risky, but I feel like it paid off, if only because it wasn’t the Same Old Thing. Beyond hero choice, District 9 is filmed (or at least, framed), in the style of a documentary, something that I feel was gutsy, but made some of the holes in the plot more obvious.

Although District 9 does a fine job of avoiding the most glaring of all sci-fi tropes, the know-it-all scientist who explains things to other characters (and thereby the viewer – think Brent Spiner in Independence Day and Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park), viewers leave the movie with many unanswered questions that feel like they needed to be explained. Where did he aliens came from? Why weren’t humans trying to adopt their technology? Why aren’t we trying more to communicate with them? With the documentary style, District 9 could have easily spent 30 seconds with a talking head explaining these things and been done with it. The lack of information about the aliens’ origin is such a glaring hole, I wonder if there is a longer cut of the movie somewhere that goes into more detail. Because Peter Jackson (the guy who directed those epic-length Lord of the Rings movies) had a part in it, I’ll be thoroughly unsurprised if a four-hour director’s cut comes out on DVD that explains more.

The whole movie feels more like an action movie than a sci-fi flick. Often I lost myself in the action, and the combination of setting, action, and soundtrack made me feel like I was watching Black Hawk Down. The atmosphere of two films feels very similar. This isn’t a downside, Black Hawk Down was well done, but I’m not sure how well the genres blend together.

The focus on action over story, specifically the camera-work in some of the action sequences, made me think of the fake sci-fi movie that is discussed in Thank You for Smoking. In Thank You for Smoking, the main character talks with a Hollywood producer about making a movie called, “Message from Sector Six.” The movie will be used to sell cigarettes: Sector-Sixes. I bring that up because District 9 uses make FPS-style camera angles and even a little mech-combat. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a FPS game come out that uses Disrict 9 as IP. It wasn’t as bad as that awful FPS sequence in the Doom movie, but the camera-work still felt very video game inspired to me. I dunno, maybe I just play a lot of video games.

The thing that bothered me most about District 9, however, were the plot holes and unanswered questions, so much so that I wonder if I fully understood it or if it really was that unexplained. When the alien does finally gets back up to the mothership at the end of the movie, the ship is empty and he is able to fly it up into space. Maybe I’m a nerd, but I simply cannot believe that an alien ship suspended in Earth’s atmosphere for 20 years would not be swarming with scientists. My buddy Shawn mentioned that maybe humans were no longer interested in the mothership because all the real technology was on the command module, buried down on the planet. But something up on that mothership fought Earth’s gravity enough to keep it up there. That kind of tech is astounding, and people would be up there trying to learn how it works.

Also, I don’t understand why there wasn’t more emphasis on communicating with the aliens. Sure, it happened 20 years ago, but humans and the aliens could understand each other, so obviously there was information there. Why it wasn’t revealed to the viewers is a huge hole. I don’t understand it. Sure, a “tell-all” scene is a huge sci-fi trope that was avoided, but the problem with not revealing the information is that it looks to viewers like the creators didn’t know it, or were too lazy to dream it up, and that breaks the immersion.

Viewers (and readers and players, for that matter) should always feel like the writers and creators have every last detail of the story figured out, even if that information isn’t revealed. They want immersion and they want a cohesive story. District 9 didn’t feel like that to me. It felt like the creators wanted to include an alien slum and “normal dude triumphs through sacrifice” theme, and wrote the plot around creating those things. The plot feels like an afterthought, which is the worst mistake a sci-fi movie can make.

Overall, I don’t feel like I wasted my money on District 9, but I don’t know that I feel it was money well spent, either. Do with that what you will.

-m.