Why a sequel to District 9 wouldn't be anything like the original--FOLLOWUP

Replies to all (well, most) of the feedback

Last week, I posted a film analysis of the movie District 9, stating the various reasons why I believed that the aliens in District 9 were undeniably hostile in intent, and came to Earth specifically in order to conquer it, and kill / enslave / eat the entire human population--and therefore a "District 10" sequel would be largely about an alien invasion, total war, and little else. For the curious, that post can be found here: http://imgur.com/gallery/04JJRrO

The post generated quite a lot of responses, most of it criticism of my points, and since it's damned difficult to discuss film theories in a Twitter-limited format, I'm writing this in order to present more precise information from the film, and to address the various arguments and concerns voiced in the comments on my previous post.

Here is a list of facts, as presented by the film itself:

1. The prawn ship arrived in 1982, twenty-something years before the film's present day, and "coasted to a halt" over Johannesburg. It is the size of a large city, and can hover midair for decades with no apparent expenditure of energy, strongly implying that the prawns have mastered antigravity.
2. The ship was totally nonresponsive for 3 months, at the end of which time the humans went up and forcibly cut through the hull and explored the ship interior. The prawns they found inside were "extremely malnourished" and showed some apprehension of the humans, but were completely "aimless", lacking the strength of will to fight or even run away.
3. Upon arrival, there were "a million" prawns, though this is not presented as an exact estimate. At the time the film is set, an MNU census puts the prawn population at about 1.8 million.
4. Shortly before the film is set, a TV news headline reads "ALIEN WEAPONS CACHES SEIZED . . . POLICE SEIZE HUNDREDS OF ALIEN WEAPONS". These weapons *could* theoretically have been deliberately planted inside District 9 by MNU, in order to increase public distrust of the prawns and/or simply to make themselves look good, but that seems unlikely, especially given the large weapons cache found in Christopher Johnson's own home, where MNU had clearly not yet been.
5. The prawns' basic nature seems to be primarily chaotic, which the prawns express through vandalism, theft, and assorted mayhem. Grey Bradnam says, "What, for an alien, might be seen as something recreational--setting fire to a truck, derailing a train--is for us, obviously an extremely destructive act."
6. Prawns are also shown to have very short tempers, and are prone to sudden violence: One rips a man's arm off for prodding him with a gun, while another opens fire (with a human-made submachine gun) on the MNU trucks simply for showing up. But because these acts take place in the present day, it is unclear whether these traits are innate to prawns, or are learned responses to past human behavior.
7. The prawns are very arguably NOT the only species to survive the journey to Earth: Some prawns and humans are seen gambling on a "cockfight" between two cat-sized insectoid creatures with long, spearlike tails, with which they try to stab each other. These creatures are never explained, so they might be a separate organism, they might be an immature or inferior caste of prawn, or they might be an Earth species that has become mutated through contact with Fluid X.
8. Upon a signal from the mothership, a prawn combat walker activated, and locked onto all humans in its field of vision as targets, & on Wikus--the only organism present with prawn DNA--as an objective. It is unclear if this action was taken by only that one specific walker, under the remote command of Christopher's son, or if it was a general "Attack" command executed by ALL functioning walkers . . . but the fact that the son is never seen viewing an image that looks the least bit like what would be seen by the walker's cameras, or like the display projected around Wikus's head when he is piloting the walker, leans toward the latter possibility. The fact that the walker kills all non-prawn creatures in the area (even those who are not a threat) and then waits to accept Wikus's entry, also suggests autonomous, pre-programmed commands, rather than individual remote control by Christopher's son.
9. While piloting the combat walker, Wikus hears the MNU soldiers planning to kill Christopher, even though he was well out of earshot, and their words were not transmitted electronically. This lends further credence to the theories that prawns have a hive mind, that information important to the officer-caste prawns is transmitted to the drones, and that Christopher is of the officer caste.

Here is a list of statements made by characters in the film. These statements may or may not be truthful / accurate:

1. The expository character Grey Bradnam states, "There were literally thousands of different theories as to why the ship seemed inoperable. What was speculated was a command module had detached itself from the main ship, and then somehow mysteriously become lost." If true, this command module certainly wasn't the only thing to drop from the ship: Another expository character, Les Feldman, says that "There's pieces falling off that vessel for bloody months, man." The nature of these "pieces" is not specified.
2. "The prawn doesn't really understand the concept of ownership or property." -- Wikus van de Merwe. This may be taken to support the theory of a prawn hive society, wherein all becomes the property of the collective, the notion of a personal possession does not exist.
3. "What we have stranded on Earth, in this colony, is basically the workers. They don't think for themselves, they all take commands, they have no initiative." -- Clive Henderson, entomologist. "They've lost all of their upper leadership through whatever cause, we presume illness." -- Grey Bradnam
4. "MNU is trying to move the aliens for humanitarian reasons, but the real focus, just as it has been right from the beginning, is weapons." -- Grey Bradnam
5. "Only our technology contains the fluid." -- Christopher Johnson, regarding Fluid X. It can also be inferred from this conversation (with a yellow-painted prawn) that Christopher is likely more than 20 years old, while his companion is not: Having a memory of time spent on the mothership would explain Christopher's far better ability to distinguish human tech from prawn tech.
6. "And they [various Nigerian gangs] amassed thousands of these weapons, without the ability to use them." -- Sarah Livingstone, sociologist
7. "He [Wikus] was the only human who had ever successfully been combined with alien genetics and remained alive." -- Grey Bradnam, strongly implying that there had been multiple other failed experiments, including fatal ones.
8. "Only one thing that could make that happen." -- Christopher Johnson, upon seeing Wikus's prawn hand, meaning that Christopher already knew that Fluid X had mutagenic effects, and could (at least partially) mutate an adult human into a prawn.
9. "Fuel goes in here! . . . Then we fly away." -- Christopher's son. It may be significant that the child, not Christopher, is the only prawn to refer to Fluid X as fuel, and Wikus only does so because the boy said it first.
10. "We have medical machines on the mother ship that can fix you." -- Christopher, referring to Wikus's transformation. Possibly a lie, because after he & Wikus return with Fluid X, he becomes more evasive, saying that the "fixing" will take three years, because "I will fix you . . . but first I must save my people. I must go home and get help. I must use all the fluid to travel quickly." This would not make sense unless using the medical machines would hamper Christopher's ability to run the mothership's main engines.
11. "No, we stick together. I'm not leaving you here." -- Christopher, to Wikus piloting the combat walker which has taken significant damage. Christopher's concern for Wikus's well-being seems genuine, especially as it is doubtful that Wikus could be of any further use to him at this point, suggesting that Christopher's stated return time of "Three years. I promise" is indeed the truth.
12. "There's no way of knowing whether or not Christopher Johnson will return. We don't know if he was simply escaping, whether he will effect a rescue plan . . . and, as the so-called Free Press says, whether or not he'll come back and declare war on us." -- Grey Bradnam. The hesitation before mentioning war could be significant. Grey may be doing it simply for dramatic effect, he may not want his audience to consider the prospect of war with the prawns, or he may be under official *pressure* not to mention war, but does so anyway because the cat is now well & truly out of the bag.

Here is a list of speculations, based on those facts and statements from the film:

1. What went wrong with the ship?
The idea that the ship's entire complement of officers died, perhaps due to some disease, is voiced, but only by a human. While this view is most likely at least close to the truth, it was never confirmed or denied by Christopher Johnson. What IS known is that that upon arrival on Earth, the ship was short of both officers AND food. Lack of a commanding will would not directly cause the disappearance of food, but it *would* trigger a loss of discipline and self-restraint, meaning the surviving prawns would likely consume the remaining food more rapidly, and perhaps even destroy it for fun. It also unlikely, but possible, that an officer is required to give authorization for the *manufacture* of food.

2. Is Christopher Johnson officer-caste?
Yes and no--he may be slowly *mutating*, or evolving, into officer-caste. He is certainly far more intelligent and self-possessed than the other prawns that we and Wikus have seen (with the single exception of his son). But he seems completely unable to direct any other prawns via the hive mind, not even for a task as important as collecting Fluid X, which would have been accomplished MUCH sooner if he'd been able to convince more than just ONE additional adult prawn to help him search.
While it is possible that Christopher is intelligent BECAUSE of his living in close proximity to the command module and working with Fluid X, it seems more likely that he chose to live directly over it (and indeed, probably triggered its separation from the mothership & rode it down) because he was already intelligent.

3. What is Fluid X?
I personally disagree with the idea that it is fuel, for two reasons. One, because it is incredibly unlikely that it could be BOTH a powerful mutagen AND a form of fuel--why the heck would a biological agent be so insanely volatile as to be able to power starships? It seems almost completely contradictory. And two, because there is so damned little of Fluid X, and every drop of it is precious, yet Christopher doesn't seem to care that Wikus wasted some of it--he doesn't even know how much of it might be left inside the cylinder. This suggests that the *cylinder* is what's important, or rather, the cylinder's "acceptance" of what's inside it. Once enough Fluid X had been collected, the cylinder "recognized" its contents and became activated. Fluid X (and therefore the cylinder) might very likely not be a fuel, but rather an ignition key: Just as the prawn weapons were biologically keyed to prawns, the higher functions of the ship would quite plausibly be keyed only to *officer-caste* prawns. Fluid X might be nothing but the highly concentrated blood of officer-castes, and Christopher was searching the fallen wreckage for control interfaces & anything else that would have required officer status to operate. If Fluid X *was* blood (or some other potent prawn extract), that would explain its mutagenic properties far more easily. That Christopher already knew that Fluid X could mutate other beings is interesting--perhaps the prawns use this effect on other species on a semi-regular basis, either to "reward" specific individuals or to make their flesh more palatable for prawn consumption, or maybe it can mutate an existing prawn up to the next higher caste.

4. Are the prawns hostile?
Yes and no, because they have no leadership. In the film, we see that the prawns do not resist the humans boarding their mothership, though this is likely from a combination of reasons, any one of which would have been sufficient: They have no command-caste prawns telling them to organize and fight back, their own drone nature has no immediate reason to view the humans as enemies, and they are too physically malnourished to even be *capable* of fighting in any case. Years later, inside District 9, we see that drone prawns can turn very violent with only slight provocation, so all human interaction with prawns is accompanied by armed bodyguards . . . yet prawns are never seen fighting each other, unless you count things like squabbling over a tire.
But all this behavior is clearly an anomaly, brought on by the freak event that killed their leaders, and with them their hive mind. With their command-caste leadership intact, we must consider the prawns' weaponry. The issue is not that they brought weapons: The issue is that they brought SO MANY weapons. Their entire population was evacuated from the ship by (what would become) the MNU, who certainly would not have wanted them to bring any dangerous weapons to Earth, so the only weapons that could have come that way must have been camouflaged or broken apart, and/or didn't look much like weapons (to us) in the first place. Then there's the ship-fall material: as Les Feldman said, "There's pieces falling off that ship for bloody months." If the ship's mission was truly benign, then those pieces would not be expected to contain high percentages of weaponry: They'd be just as likely to be loose parts of the ship's hull, or the contents of a damaged cargo hold, or engines, or life support, or deliberately ejected waste. With the MNU trying to stop all Earthbound weapons, and more weapons unlikely to fall from the ship, that's a really small percentage of weapons that would make it to the ground. Yet we see news stories of "Police seize HUNDREDS of alien weapons" (and that was just one raid), and the Nigerian gangs are known to possess "thousands" of them. If you crunch the numbers, that adds up to an original ship cargo of approximately 4.47 metric fucktons of weapons. (Yes, I suppose some of the MNU agents could be bribed to allow some smuggling, but what prawn would have the strength of mind, or the communication skills, or the material wherewithal, to do so?) The alternate possibility is that the ship came with deliberately hostile intentions, and the ship-fall parts are anything but accidental: They are pre-programmed regular drops of food, guns, ammunition, and other war materials intended to resupply an invasion force that already controlled the ground underneath the ship. In this scenario, the ship's cargo of weapons is calculated to be much lower (only 1.96 metric fucktons), but requires premeditated hostility. Either way you slice it, the prawn leaders sure as hell intended to fight SOMETHING, and that something was most likely on a planet.

And here is a list of comments on my previous post, and my full responses to them:

"You're assuming the prawns have space flight technology from 20th century earth, they obviously had much more complex methods of travel"
"You're assuming the Prawns don't have FTL"
"Your speculation on fuel consumption is too much established on how we practice space travel."
Okay, to test that, let's break completely away from current human astronavigation. Let's assume that the prawns have a propulsion system similar to Star Trek:TNG, one that enables them to visit a new planet pretty much every week (under normal conditions, that is), and fuel consumption is hardly ever an issue. It also seems a safe assumption that if Christopher calculates that a round trip back to Earth would take 3 years, then a one-way journey would be 1.5 years. Under this scenario, my original Point 1 (that Earth was always the prawns' intended destination) is not PROVEN to be correct, but is still extremely likely. Consider:
Option 1: The prawns were en route to [somewhere] when the ship suffered the loss of its commanders, and possibly some sort of mechanical failure. They are only roughly 1.5 years away from their homeworld (or some other repair/resupply station), but they may or may not have enough food to survive the journey. Through an incredibly fortuitous circumstance, they are significantly closer to a planet that just "happens" to be an EXACT match for their biochemistry, and they *do* have enough food to fly to it (and then just sit there for three months), as well as an autopilot able to spontaneously change course for that world (but not able to tell the surviving prawns to make more food, or to open the doors & make nice with the humans).
Option 2: The ship was already locked in for Earth before it even left, but the officers died somewhere along the way. Three months of food would likely be more than sufficient for the prawns to develop their own secure Earth-based food supply.
Which scenario sounds more probable to YOU?

"Why would you not carry weapons when exploring the universe? What if you meet hostiles when you land somewhere?"
"And did it actually mention in the movie that it just carried weapons? Or was it just because that's all the MNU cared about."
Okay, let's compare the prawn ship to Star Trek again. The Enterprise carries weapons too, full banks of phasers & photon torpedoes, as well as shields. There are also handheld phasers carried by all away teams as standard procedure, as well as some more rarely seen rifle-sized phasers. Worf also owns an impressive set of Klingon melee weaponry. But . . . that's pretty much it. The Enterprise ALSO contains clothing, furniture, musical instruments, artworks, medicines, data records (even a few books), and scientific equipment of every description. Compare that to what we know of the prawn ship: We barely saw the interior, but obviously there must have been SOMETHING inside, and it's not like Earth scientists didn't have 20+ years to study what they found, and every reason to trumpet/profit from their discoveries. Yet we hear *nothing*, except for Christopher's one mention of "medical machines". At no point in the film do we see alien tech incorporated into human life, no advertisements for space-age alien materials, no alien-rights activists promoting prawn culture. In the one place on Earth with the greatest alien contact, we have nothing from them--except weapons. It is never explicitly stated that there was nothing on board except weapons, but seriously--after 20 years, you'd expect there to have been SOME commercial applications. Some people (including the film's director, Neill Blomkamp) think/say the prawns were on a mining mission . . . so where's the mining equipment? Or the minerals that they've already collected?

"Nice analysis, except you said the ship only carried weapons, specifically not defensive weapons, but wtf is a defensive weapon?"
It's determined by direction, range, and relative mobility, apart from other qualities like being deliberately non-lethal. A good parallel is eye placement: Herbivores have their eyes on opposite sides of their head, to detect predators coming from any direction, while most carnivores have both eyes facing forward, to focus on a single prey creature. Similarly, a fighter plane like the British Spitfire was purely offensive: Its guns were locked forward toward a single target, and its high maneuverability meant it could put those guns pretty much anywhere. In contrast, the guns of a B-29 Flying Fortress were defensive: They were pointed in all directions to fend off enemy planes coming from (almost) any angle, and the plane's low mobility & strict flight path meant that the German fighters had to come to IT, it could not go to them. Meanwhile, the B-29's primary armament, the bombs, were strictly offensive, as they were fired in one direction against a target that could not dodge. Coming back to District 9, the hull of the prawn mothership might very well be bristling with defensive weapons, it's never mentioned. What we DO see is a bunch of weapons with long range & extremely high mobility, that can be focused on a single target, and are quite definitely NOT non-lethal.

"And locking your gun to your own species seems pretty smart. I can see humans doing exactly that, if we develop a simple enough to deploy mechanism for it and begin voyaging through space."
That's very true, once we reach a certain point. As long as we stick to the "one destination per mission" model, then things like human-only devices could (& should) still be interpreted as deliberately *excluding* the indigenous creatures of the single destination world. But as we develop multi-destination travel, leapfrogging from world to world, then human-locked weapons would just be good sense: After all, if you DO encounter intelligent life, and peaceful negotiations DO break down, you've got to assume that at least *one* of your guys is going to get disarmed, so species-locks would be a wise precaution.

"Even all the "rifles" and the big mech-thing he gets inside are not truly military weapons, they could be used against megafauna which flourished on earth for a long time, and the mech could be used in construction or mining purposes. I'd expect some kind of tanks, anti-aircraft weapons, artillery, longer ranger, vehicle mounted, much more powerful stuff."
Nope. If the prawns had anything that we would recognize as artillery or a tank, there's no way in hell MNU would allow it planetside, and we'd never see it--which is indeed the case, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They may have allowed the combat walker (unless it came in a drop) because they wanted to allow the benefit of the doubt, and to test whether it *could* indeed have peaceful applications. But consider Wikus's piloting of the walker: Its features which *could* be used for peaceful purposes include its base strength (you could tow stuff), hands (which Wikus uses to grab an RPG in midair), and some sort of telekinesis (which Wikus uses to pick up and throw a pig without touching it). So that's towing, two hands, and a pig-thrower, balanced against . . . a heavy machine gun, a plasma cannon, two pods full of short-range missiles, body armor, and a force field which can stop incoming small metallic projectiles, gather them into a ball, and hurl them back at high velocity. (This last system was clearly designed specifically to counteract either the bullets fired by human guns, or something almost EXACTLY like them.) So--no, the walker wouldn't be much help at all for things like construction, and the guns of course do nothing but kill. Even the infantry weapons we see could definitely bring down even the most threatening dinosaur, so the combat walker's more powerful armament must be meant for even *more* durable targets, while its armor and shields meant that the prawns expected their enemies to shoot BACK. No, all of this hardware was most definitely designed for purely military applications.

"If they had seed, farming supplies, or goods they would probably have gone through them since they were starving inside. and what type of intergalactic trade goods would even suffice? Nobody travels in space expecting to trade food because you'd expect other civilizations that can communicate with them to have their own food/seed. So the only viable trade items that would be universally worth anything would be rare metals, weapons, or technology."
Fair points. You can indeed eat your livestock and (most) seeds . . . but not your tractor or your plow. As for trade goods, cultural items (books of art, recordings of music & dance, certain fabrics, translation aids, etc.) seem a fair bet, and of course raw materials could be extremely valuable, especially if they were unobtainable / undeveloped by the other civilization. Medical technology would not be applicable (you'd almost certainly have no idea what the aliens' physiognomy might be), but things like star charts and your equivalent of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would always be welcome, as well as equipment to aid with common tasks like farming, logging, mining . . . and yes, fighting. As stated above, the Enterprise carries all of these things, the prawn mothership only seems to have one.

"It seemed more likely to me that they were refugees fleeing a war, not bringing one"
"Here's another interpretation: they were running from something. Offensive weapons, a ship that is best described as a "life boat", and a world/governmental leader on board? They were either running from something else or expected to meet something worse than they were"
They might be fleeing from enemies, but not in the sense that they're being pursued. If the enemy had even roughly comparable space-travel technology, then THEY too would have arrived at Earth by now: It's been more than 20 years, and it's not like the enemies wouldn't look for the prawns on a planet that PRECISELY matches their homeworld. The prawns might, however, be fleeing from some enemy that conquered their homeworld and then just stopped. If the prawns *are* fleeing, we know it's from a war that the prawns had at least some chance of winning (nothing else would explain why the ship is stuffed with armaments), but they're recently suffered a sudden & catastrophic setback--but not SO catastrophic that all their starship facilities were wiped out, because 20+ years later, Christopher's got to believe that there's still a place where he can go, resupply & repopulate the ship, and get back to Earth in 3 years' time. It's tempting to think that this setback might be the root cause of why all the prawn ship's officers died; although if it was some disease (as it was rumored to be) then Christopher would have to be painfully aware that the entire ship might still be infected, and bringing it to another prawn population center could trigger *another* outbreak, killing precisely the officers that the prawns still on Earth so badly need.
All in all, this scenario is a viable possibility, but it still suffers from the huge improbability of the prawns just "happening" to land on a planet that is perfectly suited for colonization, so the "deliberate conquest" theory is still the stronger explanation by far.

"not only that but the ship is like a city size, how does OP know it's not for the police in the ship or military police."
Do you mean that those weapons we see were only for those prawns which were their police force? Given the power of the weapons shown, that would be ludicrous--it'd be like our own cops using flamethrowers & bazookas to deter jaywalking & pickpocketing; not to mention the sheer *number* of weapons, which is almost certainly quite vast. Or did you mean that the *entire* ship's population could be police? If so, I think I'll lump that in with the "army fleeing a catastrophic war" scenario just above.

"they actually pretty explicitly said that the prawns that arrived on earth weren't hostile. Also, MNU were still a pack of bastards lmao."
"I am pretty sure during the film it explains they were mining slaves abandoned or something by their overlords. They managed to find earth."
"Dude. It says in the movie they had ship trouble and traveled to the closest inhabitable planet. They weren't invading."
Actually, no, the film said NONE of those things. All of the actual quotes and facts that pertain to the origins / motivations of the prawns are listed near the top of this post, everything else must come from the viewers' imaginations and assumptions (MNU *were* in fact a pack of bastards, so that makes the prawns the Good Guys, right?), as well as from publicity materials. One interview with Neill Blomkamp (thanks, tictacked4) *does* quote him saying things like:
" . . . a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own. I found that to be a really interesting concept. Also, it sort of explains why they don't turn on the humans."
" the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home."
"And the ship, when the army generals or the queen of that particular ship died off by some sort of virus or bacteria that they picked up on some other planet, that killed them off. And it didn't effect these sort of resilient, hardy sort of drone workers. . . . So the ship just auto pilots to the closest one in the Goldilocks band, and it's our planet and then pulls up and hits the breaks."
Equally relevant to what the director said in this interview is what he did NOT say: There is absolutely *no* mention of any weapons, or fighting, in fact the closest we get to a war reference is his mention of "army generals" (which, interestingly enough, he listed *before* the queen). So either
A) Blomkamp started out wanting to make a movie that was VERY different from the movie that he actually DID make, or
B) He always intended to involve lots of combat, but deliberately censored himself in order to give the wrong impression.
Director or not, I don't think that interview can be taken as gospel. Even if we ignore the weapons issue, he's being deliberately misleading. (Again, if they're miners, where's the equipment and the cargo? One of the deleted scenes shows the CEO of MNU saying that the prawns they've taken back up to the ship definitely do NOT know how to operate anything on board, which presumably would include mining equipment, *if* it were there.) Blomkamp also revealed himself to be less than scientifically literate when he suggested that the prawns were from the Andromeda Galaxy. (What, is their entire GALAXY already mined out?)

"you speculate too much. it's all up to the author and director. how they want it is how it's going to be. End of story."
"Yea, that's why none of these ever make any sense, it's up to the author, not anyone else"
I have exactly as much right to provide analysis, speculation, & commentary on a film as anyone else has to provide analysis, speculation, & commentary on my posts. If a science fiction story wants to be taken seriously, especially if it places itself on *this* Earth (and not some other setting where we can presume that the rules are different), then it MUST be held to certain standards, and called out if it fails to meet those standards. Star Wars, for example, takes place in a universe where magic is real, there is sound in space, and there's a bottomless pit wherever you go; so we're more willing to forgive / overlook things like Luke flying from Hoth, to Dagobah, and then to Bespin, all in a one-man fighter & with no mention of refueling. But if District 9 is going to pride itself on its gritty realism, then dammit, I'm going to demand realism. If a film presents certain things as facts, then I will judge it based on those facts. If a ship is packed with a million soldiers and 4 million weapons, I'm going to presume that they're up to no good. If Blomkamp really wanted to make a film about peaceful miner aliens who landed here by accident, then why the hell DIDN'T he?

"Sometimes a storyteller tells a different story than they intended."
Exactly.

"Also your first point about it being impossible to end up anywhere other than where you wanted to go, yeah you can miss and end up elsewhere"
There is a sewing needle on the surface of the Moon. Here, try to hit it with this laser pointer. Did I mention that the needle is moving at about 80 miles per hour?
Yeah. That's roughly your odds of survival. If we're talking pure astromechanical ballistics again, then if you miss your originally-intended target, you might as well flip a coin. Heads, you get sucked into the gravity well of a star and burn up. Tails, you drift through the inky eternity forever . . . heck, space is expanding so fast that you could actually find yourself heading RIGHT TOWARD a planet that you'll never reach, because you're not going fast enough to catch up with it.
And if we're playing by Star Trek FTL rules, hey, who knows. Space is still INCREDIBLY empty.

"I'm just saying whenever someone says another is fucking stupid for not figuring things out while they did, it sounds pretty pretentious."
I never said that Wikus was stupid because he was dumber than me, I said he was stupid because he was RIGHT THERE, in the exact epicenter of *everything* that was going on, and he was still absolutely blind. Okay, granted, he's got a lot of perception bias going on--he's been indoctrinated to think of prawns as a lesser species, and his natural meekness is hit with the double whammy of his boss also being his father-in-law, and then on *top* that is the fact that the MNU bio-weapons researchers were almost fiendishly inhumane . . . but even so, I find his uptake to be almost unbelievably slow. He's right next to the very core of the MNU, so he knows roughly how many weapons they keep finding, he even found a large cache himself. He knows what those weapons DO, because he personally fired them. He knows how physically violent prawns can be, he's had training in calming them, and seen firsthand what happens if you don't. And yet after all that, he still manages to add 2 + 2 and get 1. How the hell can you use a combat walker's plasma cannon to outright *liquefy* a dude and still think to yourself, "You know, all these prawns really want is their freedom, and to be treated with respect. What could be suspicious about all of this?"

"You all know that it's just a representation of apartheid, right?"
Oh yes, the subtext is quite clear, and the allegorical combination was a wise choice, as it both highlights the real-life social issue (by turning it on its ear) and makes the sci-fi story much richer and more flavorful. It's not meant to be an *exact* parallel, of course, otherwise Blomkamp would be implying that the South African blacks could only be saved from apartheid through violence, and by a white savior who helps a genetically superior black man to ascend. Let's just leave it as a film that gains additional strength from the vicious treatment that aliens receive from humans . . . and that makes people go home & consider how they sometimes treat their own neighbors the same way.

"OP the science fiction element of this movie was simply a tool with which to carry a social critique. In this case of South Africa."
"I agree. I don't think the writers looked at it as a real science fiction movie, I think it was a political statement. Like Elysium."
Surprisingly, no. In the first of the "A Filmmaker's Log" bonus features, Terri Tatchell, co-writer of the film, clearly states that "Neill was very adamant during the entire writing process that this *isn't* a political-statement film. First and foremost, it's meant to entertain."

Thank you all for your time, and especially for your continued interest in this fascinating film.

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FACEPALM EDIT: I can't believe I missed this. After putting SO much thought into this film, writing so much, and hitting the Front Page twice (thanks again, everyone!), I just can't believe I overlooked a wholly *alternative* explanation, that works perfectly well:

The prawns came to Earth to SELL us the weapons. It would explain *everything*, about 99% as well as the "deliberate invasion" theory. Had their leaders not died, they could very well have showed up and been all,
"Hey dudes! We've noticed that you guys just seem to LOOOOOVE blowing each other up, so we thought we'd help you with that. You see, we saw you using *nuclear* weapons on yourselves, and this is a REALLY nice planet you've got here, and we'd rather not see it get irradiated all to hell. So, we'll trade you OUR really nifty boom-booms in exchange for YOUR nuclear boom-booms. Sound like a plan?"
"We've made sure the grips and triggers are what you're used to, and even the combat walker is REALLY self-explanatory. You can't use them yet, every weapon is keyed to be usable by us only--but on every weapon you buy, we'll just deactivate the lock and you can go play bang-bang with your friends. Then we'll use your nukes for fuel, out in space, where it's safe."

That would turn the entire film on its ear, AGAIN, in a wholly DIFFERENT way. ("They came here to save us from ourselves . . . so we forced them into slums and ate their body parts for kicks.") Who would expect a movie (or an alien species) to be both pro-environment AND pro-war? Heck, this could even make for a pretty good unexpected twist in District 10.

Again, I'm amazed that I didn't realize this earlier. Even when I was replying to AlmostScientist's comment, in which he specifically mentioned the use of weapons as possible trading goods, I was firmly locked onto the idea that "No WAY did they come here to peacefully trade, their ship was full of *nothing but* weapons!" It was only hours (and an additional inductive leap) later that it clicked, that the prawns could have come to peacefully trade *nothing but* weapons. I guess I have more in common with Wikus than I thought.

Ah well, thanks again!