D9

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

Peter Korsten wrote:
> Op 15-2-2010 9:44, Gert van Santen schreef:
> 
>> Saw District 9 yesterday. What a disturbing, violent but awesome
>> movie!
> 
> Only, the message is a little too much down-your-throat: whites and 
> blacks working happily together in South Africa, with a bunch of aliens 
> as a common enemy. But interesting nevertheless; it makes a change from 
> all the stuff coming from Hollywood.

Peter - the film is *very* knowing.

Early on, as the [lead character] is getting out the back of a van, he calls one 
of the (black) security officers "boy", which is throwback to a time when racism 
had to be accepted by the oppressed, in order to keep a job, or keep things 
quiet (read some of Mandela's autobiography, to get a glimpse of this).

The whole of D9 is a comment on how humans, of any colour, are ready to oppress 
and repeat the mistakes of the past, and this is a film that is aimed at that, 
as well as, opening up a broader "cosmic" perspective, with which we might need 
to familiarise ourselves, one day...

Put it this way, if aliens arrive, and are not so stupendously arrogant or 
tech-wieldingly intimidating, eg, they visit as equals...

just how would human beings treat them?

OR... if we head off to the stars before we get visited, will we be willing to 
visit, as equals, any culture, at any stage of development?

The lead character in Avatar accepts this challenge.

Tony (HB)