2009-08-17 10:35:42

JAMES HYNES: ALIEN NATIONS AND WORKING STIFFS IN SPACE

Filed under: 2001:A Space Odyssey, Books, District 9, James Hynes, Moon, Movies
Posted by: John

By James Hynes

This weekend I saw two ambitious indie sci-fi movies, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and Duncan Jones’s Moon. Leaving aside their relative levels of commercial success (District 9 looks like it might be a sleeper hit, while Moon seems to have barely registered with the public), seeing them both within a day of each other provoked several reactions in me.

District 9 starts out as a faux documentary about a ghetto of extraterrestrial beings on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. The back story is that 20 years ago, the aliens’ craft (an immense disk straight out of Independence Day) stalled out over J’burg, and the ailing aliens were eventually taken off their ship by the J’burg authorities and placed in a slum called District 9, where all the usual conditions apply–crime, violence, barely repressed rage–and where the obvious allegorical link to South Africa’s real history is unavoidable. At the start of the film, a craven and gutless human civil servant (brilliantly played by Sharlto Copely) is sent into District 9 to clear the aliens out and move them to what is, in effect, a concentration camp. Things go south from there, and the film, without entirely losing its clearly satirical and allegorical intent, shifts from a docudrama to what Bill Paxton’s character in Aliens so memorably called a “bug hunt,” albeit a bug hunt where the audience is clearly meant to root for the bugs.

In Moon, the gifted Sam Rockwall plays a working stiff in on the moon, where he mans a corporate mining station all by himself on a three-year contract, accompanied only by a very HAL 9000-ish computer called Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and, later in the story, by a very spooky identical copy of himself. Again, complications ensue. It’s a much quieter film, even contemplative, with a fair amount of mystery and suspense, but very little action and (by the expensive standards of your average CGI blockbuster) very rudimentary special effects: the lunar exteriors are clearly models, but somehow that adds to the gloomy charm of the film.

The twin reactions the films provoked in me are these: first, that they were, despite different settings, stories, and pacing, very similar thematically. Both rely on the sci-fi trope (some might say cliché) of the evil, profit-mongering corporation (not that I have any problem with that), and both, more importantly, raise the classic sci-fi question of what, if anything, makes a sentient creature–an alien, a robot, a clone–a person with rights and dignity; both films evoke, without really exploring in depth, the moral, political, and cultural complications that ensue from raising that issue. The other question, which neither film can answer, and maybe shouldn’t be expected to, is if it’s possible, this deep into the postmodern age of popular art, to make a narrative that isn’t assembled from the parts of earlier narratives.

Maybe it’s just my advanced age, and too many thousands of hours spent watching sci-fi movies and TV shows, but I spent much of each film thinking about earlier and, in some cases, better films. District 9 is brilliantly made, but it’s pretty sentimental finally (there’s even a cute alien child), and it’s certainly not the first sci-fi film to evoke aliens as sympathetic (see Enemy Mine, for example) or even as an underclass: see the film (and the short-lived TV show) Alien Nation, which posited an alien race as illegal immigrants, living in ghettos, poorly integrated into mainstream society. District 9 even lifts a particularly choice bit from Alien Nation: in the earlier film, one of the culinary quirks of the aliens was that they loved milk that had gone bad, slugging down quarts of chunky two percent, while in District 9, the aliens are addicted to cat food as if it were methamphetimines.

Moon had a similar, quasi-nostalgic effect on me. Indeed, most of it played like a variation on the theme of the long, shipboard scenes in 2001, where Kubrick dwelled on the sterility and boredom of long stays in space, where an astronaut’s only stimulation comes from running in place (around the rotating drum of the spaceship in 2001, on a treadmill in Moon) or from stilted messages from loved ones on earth. Moon, to its credit, is a grittier and more psychologically astute film; it’s that rarity in film sci-fi, namely a character-driven drama in which we see not only the grubby industrial workspace and messy private quarters of the astronauts (as in Alien or the miners-in-space epic, Outland), but also the slow spiritual rot of the main character. But even that has antecedents, and in interviews, director Jones has cited as an influence the little-remembered 1972 film Silent Running, which was directed by Douglas Trumbull (who was in charge of the SFX for 2001), and which featured a brilliantly anxious Bruce Dern as another solitary working stiff in space. And as the story in Moon plays out, explicitly raising question of what it means to be person when “people” can be manufactured to order for specific tasks, the film evokes Blade Runner and any number of other films and TV shows that involve questions of identity and personhood for cyborgs, robots, machines, etc.

Actually, seeing the films together provoked a third question: namely, in this golden age of smart television, is it possible for even intellectually ambitious feature films like District 9 and Moon to adequately explore the various questions they raise? The late, great Battlestar Galactica explored similar questions of identity, dignity, class, justice, and so on, but by virtue of its vastly longer running time (not to mention the intellectual boldness and consummate skill of its writers, actors, and production team) was able to explore them at much greater length and in much greater depth. For all the skill and artistic integrity of the two films–and I enjoyed them both immensely–they can’t come close to the political complexity and moral and spiritual depth of Galactica, which over the course of its run managed to lay bare, week after week, the gloriously and ineffably human (so to speak) messiness of real life, in a science fiction context.

Suffice it to say that, while I’m geeked (and I do mean geeked) to see what Blomkamp and Jones do next, I have seen the future of filmed sci-fi, and it’s on television.

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