It had to
happen: invading aliens are now the good guys.
Hollywood loves to turn the tables on its own
hackneyed formulae. For decades, Native Americans were on an endless warpath in
the movies,
getting up in the morning with only one item on their "to do" list: namely,
mount yet another attack on gnarly ranchers and the occasional wagon
train. But these days, the Indians in the popcorn palaces are laid back;
sage and sympathetic.
Overturning
cliches always plays well, because doing so allows filmmakers to meld helpful
familiarity (you know how these guys are supposed to behave) with surprise
(they're not conforming to type).
In
"District 9," a hubcap-shaped alien mother ship – looking like a kit bash of a
few thousand Revell model tank parts – comes to Earth
and stalls over Johannesburg.
The confused occupants disembark, and quickly confront their South African
hosts with yet another social problem (as if the country needs one).
Where do we put these dudes?
The South
Africans respond with a nod to history by stuffing the aliens into a massive
camp in the bad part of town: Soweto
for extraterrestrials.
The accidental tourists multiply like rabbits, and after a few decades turn
their township into a really unattractive neighborhood.
Attempts to
deal with the aliens (read: get them out of everyone's hair) become the day job
of a stumbling Afrikaner (played by Sharito Copley) –
a bureaucrat who's in the employ of a massive, and manifestly malevolent,
defense contractor. The mixture of innocence, danger, and squalor is at first
confusing; ten minutes after the opening titles, you think you're watching "Borat" meets "Blackhawk Down."
The social
commentary in "District 9" is about as obvious as Vin Diesel in a Munchkin bar,
and reviewers have had a nice time trying to figure out the political intent of
the film. But what about the alien angle?
Is it realistic to think that a passel of extraterrestrials could really get
stranded on Earth, confronting us not with havoc and destruction, but with a
far more prosaic problem: accommodation?
Probably not. These guys cause social problems only because they're pretty much like
us. Sure, physically they're a bonkers blend of
Ray Harryhausen skeleton warriors, oversized
lobsters, and that tentacled Davy Jones character
from Pirates of the Caribbean. With more mouth parts than a bag
full of grasshoppers, these guys aren't attractive. Unlike the smooth,
calm-and-collected grays that entice Scully and Mulder, the aliens in "District 9" are upright crawdaddys.
What's hard
to swallow about these extraterrestrials-in-residence is that they think like
us, share our emotions, and even have the same body gestures. And while they're
technically capable of a few things we're not – interstellar
travel comes to mind – they're not obviously more advanced. We can
even operate their rockets and weapons, although you have to sport a bit of
alien DNA to do this (an idea reminiscent of a long-ago proposal that would use
biometric sensing to limit the use of handguns to legitimate owners).
Bottom
line: if you could get over their fruit de mer
appearance, you might sit next to these "District 9" residents on the bus.
All of
which makes them comprehensible and ultimately sympathetic. But trust me, real aliens will be real different. They won't have DNA
that can mix with ours, they won't enjoy dining on cat food, they won't have
technology we can instantly operate, and they won't be like Neanderthals
– just another species that's pretty similar, but not similar enough to get
along.
That's a
mistake that Hollywood
makes repeatedly: the anthropocentric view that aliens, if they'd only dress better,
could pass for humans. Filmmakers must adopt this point of view, for
otherwise the aliens would be, well, too alien.
"District
9" breaks new ground by condemning alien invaders to a degrading, ghetto
existence. It's undoubtedly a long way from reality, but then again, so
are the aseptic grays who come to Earth in immaculate, polished spacecraft with
no more subtlety of intent than to probe our privates.
It's nice
when the bad guys can occasionally get out of character.
Seth Shostak is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter.
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