Today, I want to share with you the classic science fiction movie "District 9" from 2009.
Listen to the "Link" of the "District 9" Audio Film Review >>>
Referral Index: ★★★★★
Suspense Index: ★★
Visual Index: ★★★★
Plot Index: ★★★★
"District Nine" is a theatrical film, but the director uses a large number of news documentary shots, DV perspectives, monitor records and character interviews, including the date and time displayed from time to time in the lower left of the screen, to make the film a documentary, and the story is narrated as if it happened in the real world.
What is more real than the picture depiction is the film's capture of human nature, although it is a story of aliens, but it reflects the real problems of human society, and the next half of the cat will also be analyzed for everyone.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="59" > one, one blockbuster</h1>
The film District Nine is directed by South African director Neil Blomkamp
Feature film debut under the supervision of The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Once the film was released, the box office continued to rise, and finally the North American box office exceeded 100 million US dollars, and the global box office approached 200 million US dollars, which is undoubtedly an impressive performance for a film that cost only 30 million US dollars.
"District 9" was also rave reviews, with IMDB ratings of 8.3; Rotten Tomatoes freshness ratings of 89 percent; and the Chicago Tribune commented on it as "Toward the end of the summer, this movie has put the whole of Hollywood to shame." By the following year, District 9 lived up to expectations and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture.
Director Neil Blomkamp was an obscure young director before filming the film. I've made some short stories, one of which is called "Aliens in Johannesburg."
Peter Jackson saw the short film and favored the short director, believing that Neil was simply made for the film. And decided to invest $30 million in his own film.
So the short story "Aliens in Johannesburg" became the feature-length movie "District Nine".
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There are many science fiction movies depicting alien creatures in Hollywood, but in the historical Hollywood science fiction movies, alien creatures come to Earth most likely to show off their might and kill everywhere. Crush the earthlings with technology far beyond the earthlings. After all, being able to come to Earth from hundreds of thousands of light-years away, alien technology must be different from that of humans.
But in District Nine, the director took a different approach, designing alien creatures as a group of cosmic refugees who came to Earth by accident.
Their social organization resembles a swarm of bees, guided by a small number of queens, but with a large number of worker drones that lack the ability to think complexly. When the empress died en masse due to accidental infection with bacteria, a large number of worker bees survived due to their strong physique, but because they lost the queen's leadership, they became a group of collective unconscious inferior creatures. The mothership also lost its target and eventually hovered over Johannesburg for nothing.
Therefore, although these aliens have a higher civilization than humans, they can only be said to be leaderless rabble-rousers who have unfortunately become slums, competing for cat food and slaughtering "prawns".
An organization called MNU (Multi-National United), Chinese literally translated as "multinational joint organization." He took the initiative to take over the management of aliens and handle the heavy responsibility of handling the relationship between humans and aliens.
In Johannesburg, a ninth district was set aside for the prawns, dedicated to alien life.
At first glance, MNU is a humanitarian organization that rescues aliens, but in fact it is not a public welfare organization, nor does it have a national background, it is a for-profit private enterprise that secretly collects alien weapons and conducts underground experiments on aliens, and is the second largest weapons manufacturer in the world.
MNU's management of the alien box in District 9, essentially the same as the coal mining company's management of the pit, is one purpose - to mine resources more efficiently.
To them, aliens are nothing more than available resources like ores.
The male protagonist was also a middle-level manager of a multinational alliance. But when the male protagonist becomes an alien, his identity has also changed from a person to a resource. When MNU discovers that the male protagonist can use alien weapons, countless greedy eyes are cast on him, and he becomes a treasure.
The male protagonist is pushed into the laboratory of dissecting aliens, and the sentence "It doesn't matter what he becomes, what matters is what we can get from him now" exposes the greedy nature of human beings. The doctor methodically narrated the whole process of the upcoming autopsy to the camera, as if there was already a corpse lying on the dissection table. They want the man's tissue, bone marrow, and blood, and they want to dissect him with nothing. And the male protagonist even in a fully awake state, understand all this.
In fact, after sorting out the background setting of the film and unveiling the mystery of the film's science fiction, it is not difficult to find that human beings have carved out the "ninth district" to isolate the "prawns", alluding to the director's experience in the apartheid period in South Africa when he was young. What the film really implies is not the contradiction between man and aliens, but precisely the contradiction between people and people themselves, showing the cruelty of people themselves, and directly attacking the darkest side of human nature.
Stripping away the image of aliens, the scene of alien life in the ninth district is an allusion to the apartheid system imposed by a small number of white people in South Africa on a large number of black people.
Blacks were oppressed in the quarantine areas, and the chaotic and dirty living conditions led to a series of social problems such as disease, unemployment, crime, etc., so that blacks had to use various extreme means to resist, and thus were subjected to more brutal suppression.
In an interview with reporters, the director said: "In my opinion, without Johannesburg, there would be no film, it is not that I have a story first, and then choose a city to tell this story. ”
This kind of worry and reflection of the director is indeed worthy of our deep consideration. Regarding the attitude towards foreign races, there is an old Chinese saying: "If you are not of my race, your heart will be different." "Human beings are always greedy, fearful and defensive about foreign races, which in the final analysis is an obstacle to communication, leading to mutual disapproval and the perception that they are human and the other is not human.
So centuries ago, Europeans massacred Indians, Japanese ruthlessly killed Chinese in World War II, and The Nazis in Germany committed genocide against Jews.
In fact, the Japanese called Chinese "china pigs" and the Nazis called Jews "Jewish pigs", which is no different from the humans in the film who call aliens "prawns". It is precisely because of this alienation that the so-called "people" kicked the alien race out of the human category, so they acted at ease when slaughtering the alien race. All of this shows the indifferent, disgusting, cruel nature of human beings towards others.
However, the irony of the movie is that many black people have become the main force against aliens, they speak English with a strong accent, and they are counted by the various faults of the prawns, and they are expected to be eliminated quickly.
Groups that were once at the bottom of the chain of contempt began to have their own objects of contempt. But when we look back at reality, the expression of the film is not divorced from reality, because in Johannesburg today, black people discriminate against white people, and Chinese cases abound.
So we learned a truth, racial discrimination, has nothing to do with race.
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"One morning, Gregor Samsa awoke from an uneasy sleep and found himself lying in bed transformed into a giant beetle."
This is the classic passage in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
Needless to say, District Nine can be counted as a sci-fi version of Metamorphosis on the contemporary screen. The male protagonist was originally an ordinary MNU staff, he was mediocre, hypocritical, cowardly, selfish, just wanted to keep his own little happiness, ordinary life, he was an ordinary person living around us,
But tragically it has become a "big prawn" that everyone spurns, just like samsa in "Metamorphosis", although there are still human emotions and psychology after the transformation, it is eventually abandoned by the human world due to the alienation of appearance, becoming a lonely "non-human".
From the male protagonist's satisfied with the promotion at the beginning of the film, to the contempt for aliens, and then to the pain, despair, fear and unspeakable anxiety in his eyes after the physical alienation.
Exploring the male protagonist's mental journey from the beginning, we find that he was originally no different from other MNU people, and also regarded aliens as livestock.
He neatly unplugged the tube that feeds the alien baby; he smiles at the camera while explaining how to eliminate the unhatched aliens, the background picture is a flamethrower spitting out a long tongue of fire, in the flames, countless alien eggs burst one after another, while the male protagonist is enjoying listening to the disappearance of small lives.
At this moment, he smiled like a dehumanizing Japanese army invading China, like a German Nazi who slaughtered Jews.
Subsequently, an accident occurred, and the male protagonist's body began to slowly alienate.
When he saw his left hand turn into a "prawn" tentacle hand, his first reaction, which was extremely frightened, was to see his wife. From here, the male protagonist officially walked to his path of alienation, and the entire human society ruthlessly abandoned him, and he has been classified as a "prawn" instead of a human.
MNU immediately conducted a weapon experiment on the male protagonist, and the blood of the alien splashed on his face, and he was extremely painful, which showed that the male protagonist also had the minimum sympathy.
It was only when he was pressed on the cold dissection table that he finally understood the transformation of his identity and took the first step of resistance.
The male protagonist escaped from the laboratory, but could not survive in the human society, the news media slandered him in a big way, with a ps, the male protagonist became a shrimp picker who made peace with aliens, he was completely isolated and marginalized, and the only way to survive was to flee to the ninth district.
With endless loneliness, helplessness and despair, the male protagonist has no choice but to fight alongside the aliens.
If at the beginning, the audience still thinks from the perspective of humans, and also thinks that aliens are "prawns" rather than people, then by this time, with the transformation of the protagonist's identity, the audience has unconsciously sided with the aliens, which is surprisingly consistent with "Avatar", which led the 3D innovation in the same year.
The audience is deeply sympathetic to the suffering of the male protagonist, which in turn extends to sympathy for the entire alien race.
The audience's position shifted with the direction of the director. Only because the audience is increasingly unable to see the humanity of the human characters in the movie: MNU covets the power of alien weapons and brutally dismembers aliens in the laboratory; ruthlessly hunts and kills former companions; the gang boss in Nigeria simply wants to eat the male protagonist raw; and his relatives also give up and abandon the male protagonist in the blink of an eye.
On the alien side, the audience sees more and more of the light of humanity: when the red vest sees the dismembered corpses of his companions, he puts down his gun and is sad and helpless. When the red vest and the son told the moon of their hometown, the father and son had a sense of homesickness in their eyes. Seeing the male protagonist caught in a bitter battle red vest, he was determined to fight side by side with the male protagonist.
At the climax of the film, the turn of the male protagonist driving the alien mech symbolizes the great return of human nature, he has overcome his selfishness and cowardice, and is willing to sacrifice himself to help the alien father and son return to the mothership and return to their homeland.
In the final battle, the male protagonist is the enemy of the whole world, and in the face of alien weapons, human beings explode like balloons, and blood and flesh fly. But the audience does not feel sympathy for these people.
In the end, the alien father and son piloted the command module in a mournful song slowly ascended into the mothership, the male protagonist looked up at the mothership rising, his eyes showed great excitement, relief, envy and bitterness, they could go home, but what about himself?
At the end of the film, flashbacks to the shot of the male protagonist before the departure of the MNU headquarters, he happily takes out his wife's wedding photo and praises her beauty with a little show off. The male protagonist in front of the camera shows a sweet smile on his face, and his eyes are full of gentle love, and he and now are sentenced to two people. The huge contrast between one before and one after adds to the sadness of the film.
In the last shot before the subtitles go up, an alien sits on top of the ruins, holding a rose made of metal, although the movie does not tell us the identity of this alien, but the audience is very clear that this prawn is the male protagonist. Even if it has been unrecognizable, it does not hinder our judgment of a person.
In "District 9", the aliens are classified as inhuman at the beginning, they are discriminated against and slaughtered like beasts, but in fact, how is their heart different from people? They also have joys and sorrows, they also have the right to live, none of them want to hurt, they just want to go home, that's all.
In order to help the alien father and son return to the mothership, the male protagonist piloted an alien mech to fight with the human armed force, and at the moment of life and death, the alien actually said "No, we have to fight side by side, I will not leave you" such a warm and hearty word.
From this point of view, it is obvious that aliens are more like people than people, and people, due to inner alienation, have begun to slowly become less like real people, and people's appearance is deviated from the inside, which is the greatest sadness.
From birth to departure, a person's appearance will undergo ever-changing, but in the end, the basis for the conclusion is not the appearance of this person, but the heart of this person and what this person does.
What exactly is a human being? Is it by appearance, skin color? Obviously not, man is human, not because he has a "human form," but because he has "human nature."