District 9

My experience leading up to watching D9 was mixed--I was a fan of Neil Blomkamp back when all I knew him for were some brilliant commercials and it was good to see Peter Jackson back in action. However I was aware of the somewhat sticky issue that nothing he had ever directed had much plot--more of a mood than anything else. As anyone who likes trailers can attest, it is much easier to love a piece of filmmaking when there is no icky progression and story to deal with. When the film finally came out the reviews did nothing to ease my ambiguity. Either they applauded it as a bold new standard in sci-fi (you know you are in dark territory when the highest praise available is "not like the things its based on"), rolled their eyes at another nerds attempt to artistically justify their love of childish things, or worse, wrote something so incredibly condescending that all I wanted to do was stay away.

Well, I finally saw it. Instead of writing a formal review, these are simply the things I left the theater thinking about.

District 9 made me think further about a number of things which were already on my mind; 1) The art of making science fiction into art, and 2) what exactly it is that makes a good movie.

It is easy to lose perspective on what the building blocks of any art form consists of, especially with something as diverse as film. A few weeks thinking about anything from cinematography to the three act structure without actually seeing a movie and I won't even remember what I like about them. This forest for the trees mindset is often exposed when science fiction or fantasy come up. What exactly does it add to a story to place it in impossible circumstances? My mind always wanders back to what is likely the origin of all story telling, the legend.

Legends do what really just about any story should do to an extent; take something to its logical extreme to illustrate a point. Including impossible elements also prompts the listener to think a little more carefully about what is being said; if my anecdote about the summer includes dragons you will know instantly that what I'm saying bears some investigation.

There is a modern and in my opinion misplaced idea that fantastical stories are not to be taken seriously. Presumably this is because many such stories are intended for the most imaginative members of society, children, who are also subject to an arbitrary and frustrating lack of modern respect.

I wish that these doubters would take the time to read J.R.R. Tolkien's brilliant 1936 essay "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics" where he brings up a fascinating and resonantly true perspective. Up until that point Beowulf was widely regarded as good except for the Dragons, both as a story and a historical document. Tolkien points out, without ever breaking the rules of rigid academic writing, that Dragons are cool and everyone knows this weather they will admit it or not.

Believe it or not, he manages to support this argument in a convincing enough way that it has permanently changed the way scholars look at Beowulf as a piece of writing. Instead of focusing on the historical value of Beowulf as a document he analyzes the narrative. The grandeur of the story, the fact that the story is about mysterious things and change in the world, these elements are improved by the presence of fantastical things.

What I like about this argument is that it doesn't rely on the cheat argument that all good science fiction is allegory. While it is true that brilliant films like District 9 and Blade Runner do refer heavily to real events, they do not rely on that connection to reality as a crutch towards artistic value. I think fantasy should refer to real life in some way, but when it is most effective it is most general; what these films have in common is that they use a made up setting to describe some human truth in a way for which there is no earthly vehicle. In other words the form changes from a film like the Godfather to a film like Blade Runner, but the function does not. After all, the Godfather really posses no more "truth" than District 9--both refer to events which never took place.

Many people cite a film's distinctiveness as positive; after all this is one of the foundations of Auteur theory. This is of course an incomplete way to look at a film; as Thompson and Bordwell say in Film Art, "Ninety minutes of a black screen would make for an original film but not a very complex one," (Thompson, Bordwell 59). However we all know that seeing something we have never seen before is often more stimulating and fun to watch.

I have never seen a movie quite like District 9. It was a combination of the documentary footage which slowly fades away but is never entirely lost (it is exhilarating the first time the viewer realizes what they are seeing cannot have been recorded by a human) and how little we get to see of any of the characters. Though the 72 hours we see are thoroughly documented, we are always aware that these characters have had whole lives before now, and we really don't get much of a sense at all of where they came from.

This doubt makes the progress of the characters and the films ambiguous ending much more powerful; the film doesn't ever come out and tell us if it will all work out, if the characters are selfish or compassionate, and just like in the real world the documentary footage constantly reminds us of, we never will know for sure.

I found myself wondering if the only reason I loved the film so much was because of its originality; I dread making bold statements I will retract later, and as a result I spend a lot of time deciding if I truly like a movie before I recommend it. But, as the previous paragraphs attest I think that these unusual traits simply tell the story in a better way than existed. If nothing else, it prompted me to think about it enough to fill this entire immense entry.