Why District 9 is a Better Flick than Avatar

Way before everyone was clamoring about Avatar and its huge cost and profitability, District 9 was raising some eyebrows of its own.   Just recently released on DVD, I was able to viddy this interesting film over the holidays. I must admit I enjoyed it more thoroughly than Avatar.

Though the effects in District 9 are comparable to the latest Star Wars films, with fully computer animated characters lacking the serene facial expressions of Cameron’s Na’vi in Avatar, the film still manages to trump Avatar with style and substance.  The mockumentary narrative combined with the fake live action news helicopter shots brings the grit in District 9. The film makes the audience feel as if the action on screen has actually taken place.  While Avatar whisks us a way to an adventure land far far away, District 9 brings the aliens have to earth, Cape-town, South Africa to be precise.

Furthermore, instead of furry blue humanoids with tails (how whimsical, don’t we wish we all had one) we’re greeted with insect like bipeds with an appetite for destruction and cat food. The fearsome and ugly aliens of District 9 make the audience think harder than do the Na’vi of Avatar. While the Na’vi are reminiscent of our cats, Smurfs, and Native Americans, the “prawns” in District 9 initially make the audience want run out to stock up on roach bombs.  Yet both movies ask the viewer to reevaluate our thought process when it comes to relating to those different from ourselves. The difference is while Avatar asks the audience to understand the simple, District 9 begs us to deal with the complex.

I am reminded of an incident in one of my classes, when a student that we’ll call Dim brought up an interesting dilemma he was running into when it came to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict.  He queried, “Why doesn’t the U.S. or Israel go in and kill all of Hamas… I don’t get it they are a terrorist organization. I mean they’ve killed people and had suicide bombers.” Lets just forget for a moment that Hamas has been voted into office by the Palestinians and that Governments are just organizations that are allowed to kill people.

Laughing it up with my Anarchist friend out in the hall, he pitied the fool, “Yeah, some people don’t get it. If you take peoples land, knock down their houses with bulldozers and tanks, treat them as less than human, and kill vast swarms of the and eventually… they fight back. “ Obviously we’re looking at two different sides of the spectrum when it comes to this topic.  But take into consideration the bias at which the media reports on the conflict before you start labeling me the unpatriotic traitorous sedition artist that I proudly am.  The New York Times for example in 2000 and 2001 reported the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian children to be more or less equal, when in fact five times as many Palestinian children had died in the conflict than Israelis.

Unfortunately most people are two caught up with the image of “Terrorist” to see past the masks and AK-47 to the suffering and desperate eyes of a brutalized people.  District 9 brings this phenomenon in sci-fi format.  Instead of the simple right and wrong involved in the moral dilemma of invading a planet that isn’t ours, the audience must figure the moral dilemma of how to treat an ugly imperfect uninvited population that needs help.

Instead of offering an anti-colonial message in a post colonial empire, District 9 reminds us that things aren’t so simple as they seem and some times we need to look past our predelictions in order to understand what people are going through.  Because no matter how many Dims or Bill O’Riellys there are to tell us things are simple and that terrorists, illegal immigrants, or whatever easily identifiable scapegoats are the source of all our problems, we still have to live together.  Thus hurting perceived enemies then leads to real enemies, which we then have to live with. Seeing as the population here on earth is rising, learning to live peacefully with one another doesn’t seem to be a problem that will be going away soon. So next time some humanoid looks more like a disgusting bi-ped insect with drooling mandibles remember, that there is something soft underneath that exoskeleton, something you shouldn’t miss.