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The Academy Awards committee just announced the 10 nominees for Best Picture. We plan to review all ten before the Academy Awards ceremony in March. Our reviews will focus mainly on four key evolutionary themes: Getting Along, Getting Ahead, Getting the Bad Guy, or Getting the Girl.
District 9 shares some features with Avatar (click here for our take on that movie). Both are about humans and aliens attempting to co-exist, and both include a strong message about prejudice and human nature. In both, the main characters end up siding with the aliens against the humans. In fact, the central characters in both end up becoming aliens.
But District 9 has not been the blockbuster that Avatar is turning out to be. And we think we know why.
Unlike Avatar, District 9 hardly demonstrates characters Getting Along, Getting Ahead, Getting the Bad Guy, or Getting the Girl. Indeed, most of this movie is spent showing the hero losing the girl, losing status, being betrayed by his friends, and being foiled by the bad guys. At the very end, we get a slight reversal, but it’s not a cathartic one. And while all this makes the movie interesting and artsy, it also makes it painful to watch.
Let’s start with Not Getting Ahead:
Instead of going from a nobody to a hero, Wikus (District 9’s protagonist) goes from the middle of the pecking order to the absolute bottom. He is totally ostracized, to the point where he cannot even buy food. He is chased by the military. The bad guys actually value him, but not as human. They want to cut him apart for research purposes. As the movie proceeds, his humanity is totally stripped away. All this agony lasts for about an hour of the film, until he finally gets a few minutes of power, in the form of an alien-made robot suit that doesn’t even fit. Really, this guy can’t catch a break.
That being said, District 9 does show the most basic level of “getting ahead” – survival. Our main character is grossly ill, he is hunted, and he is abandoned by nearly everyone, but he never gives up.
Not Getting the Girl: Again, the main human character only ever sees the downside of this theme. His father-in-law quickly sells him out, and his lovely wife doesn’t put up much of a fight to defend him, eventually telling him to get lost. When she finally calls him to reconcile, it’s actually a trap.
Not Getting Along: Wikus does need somebody on his side, and he forms an uneasy alliance with the main alien, Christopher. Wikus and Christopher, however, don’t have anything more than that – an alliance based on the barest level of exchange (until very, very late in the movie). Wikus and Christopher hardly watch each others’ backs. In fact, Wikus betrays Christopher, and leaves him to die inches from safety. Hardly the behavior we expect of a hero.
Not Getting the Bad Guy: While working on our documentary on evolutionary themes in movies, we interviewed UBC psychologist Mark Schaller, who has done extensive research on the different motives underlying intergroup prejudice. One form of prejudice involves fear -- the concern that some member of another group will beat you up. Another form of prejudice involves disgust – the concern that members of another group carry contagious diseases that you might catch. Schaller notes that cinema has exploited both types of prejudice, presenting either “big, bad, burly guys with guns” or “oozing, slimy, disease-ridden aliens.”
District 9 is chock full of very nasty guys carrying guns, and using them on defenseless victims. District 9 also exploits the fear of disease with far more aplomb than any movie we’ve seen since Alien. The main character is infected, and violently ill. He spews black vomit. He loses his fingernails. He loses his teeth. And the fear of disease is evoked throughout the film in various ways. The aliens themselves are not the lovely super-humanoids of Avatar, but dripping, insectoid creatures, who eat raw meat and tear animals apart. When people get shot by the alien’s guns, they explode, and blood splatters everywhere, including onto the camera lens. As a consequence, you’ll want to skip the appetizing snacks during this one. Whereas Avatar transports you to a world more beautiful, colorful, and graceful than our own, District 9 shows you our own planet at its worst, taking you into a filthy slum, filmed in scratchy and realistic videocamera style. Oddly enough, though, you will in the end feel that our own species deserves less affection than the disgusting insectoid aliens.
But it’s probably not entirely the disgust factor that keeps District 9 from being as popular as Avatar. As UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth told us, one of the reasons people watch film is to see other people excel at solving problems -- in the hopes of learning how to solve those problems ourselves. We naturally want to distance ourselves from people who do poorly, and there is only so much audience appeal to be had in a movie that paints a bleak picture of human nature, and leaves little hope for our species.
All that said, the movie is brilliant in conception, and the experience is worth sitting through. People are, after all, drawn to fistfights, automobile accidents and horror movies, and District 9 satisfies that morbid curiosity and then some. Although neither of us had the desire to buy the DVD so we could see it again and again, we give it a solid B grade (we’re currently only rating films that have been nominated for Best Picture, so we're grading on a fairly stiff curve). Check it out, but you just might want to follow it up with a heartwarming Disney movie to cleanse your cognitive palate.
Evolutionary Grade:
A - Ambulating Anthropoid |
B - Bouncing Bonobo | X dlk | X dtk |
C - Crawling Crayfish |
D - Dozing Drosophila |
E - Extinct Eukaryote |
For additional information:
Schaller, M., Park, J. H., & Faulkner, J. (2003). Prehistoric dangers and contemporary prejudices. European Review of Social Psychology, 14, 105-137.
Coauthored by Douglas T. Kenrick
