D9

[Gert van Santen]

Tony Hardie-Bick schreef:
> 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.

Very well said, Tony. I agree completely.

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:-)

G e r t   v a n   S a n t e n
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