Avatar

Ding-dong, the flat old movie screen is dead. So sayeth writer/director James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, the first feature ever filmed in High Definition 3D. No question, it nails the 3rd D, adding unprecedented depth to scenes. Unfortunately, it also shrinks its plot and characters to 1D, a departure from the darkly, richly layered films for which Cameron is justly celebrated: Terminator, Aliens, Abyss and Titanic.

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Avatar is a cinematic platypus, improbable but fun to watch. It feels like Lord of the Rings in spirit and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain in concept with a story line somewhere between Last Samurai and Pocahontas. There’s more fantasy in Avatar than previous Cameron films and less sci-fi, more beating heart, less fevered chase. The looming apocalypse typically hogging center stage in Cameron films has been replaced by the magic of life. The Terminator has become Tinkerbelle.

JC conceived and built HD 3D technology for this film, his first since Titanic 10 years ago. In his hands it’s digital silly putty and the film bursts with the excitement of pure play. There are, for example, a seemingly endless supply of gigantic flying lizards colored like Japanese kites that serve as transit for the locals and mysterious sea polyp-like creatures that seem to swim in the air, quietly radiating benign intelligence. All this and much, much more keeps coming at you all the time from every possible angle, Pixar on steroids, basically.

Of course, IMAX has long delivered this kind of cinematic wow with the overwhelming force of its size and sound, and some truly amazing camera work. Ditto innovative CGI films such as Jurassic Park and King Kong. But HD 3D does something new: it comes right off the screen, seemingly close enough to touch. At times, it really made me feel like I was part of the movie. The characters and landscapes have a palpable gravity to them, more real and surreal at the same time, another small step towards holograms. Trippy, without ingesting any psychedelics. We can only hope that this powerful technology doesn’t fall into the hands of advertising executives or terrorists.

Oh, and then there’s a story, too. It goes something like this: a twenty-something Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a likable, mid-22^nd Century paraplegic, signs up for a mission on the planet Pandora. He meets a young Na’vi woman with big, round Smurf eyes and cat-like features named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). She takes him under her wing, teaching him her people’s ways, and they fall in love. Meanwhile, Jake’s employer, an intergalactic mining corporation, is using his reconnaissance to blast and bulldoze the Na'vi off land which sits atop a rare mineral worth zillions back on earth.

And so it goes. The Na’vi live in peaceful, Native American-like harmony with their planet, a tropical paradise where nature is sacred and healing. The military people and their corporate masters are either shallow and cunning or mean spirited and cunning. They seem to live only to make obscene profit and bash the Na’vi. It’s a message you can’t miss even if you’re watching in 2D.

Near the end of the film, the Na’vi flee the advancing armies, gathering around a huge tree with drooping branches, entwining their hands with exposed root tendrils. It’s a kind of organic Internet link connecting them with each other and their planet. They chant and sway together, one people, one body, one planet, a Live Aid concert with set design by Apocalyto. In connecting this way, they start events in motion which ultimately rout the bad guys and save Pandora from destruction.

It’s a hokey but powerfully moving scene because it says something that Al Gore et.al. feel but cannot convey: Human beings are unconscious Terminators and we’ve got to wake up.

I hope that this scene becomes the Woodstock moment of the early 21^st Century, what Richie Haven’s Freedom was to the ‘60’s generation, a direction home.

It might work, given the film’s world-wide release and the star power of its messenger. Think about it: a guy who loves blowing stuff up and scaring us to death has morphed into a prince of peace, a sensitive poet of life’s miracles and wonders. If Cameron can make this transformation, rebalancing the earth’s overheated atmosphere should be a piece of cake. Maybe love will conquer all, after all, and that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

A Serious Man

Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Fred Melamed, and Richard Kind. 105 minutes.

A Serious Man was filmed in St. Louis Park, Minnesota where the Coens’ grew up in the Fifties. This black comedy is their most personal movie to date, the least ultra-violent and the most Jewish.

There’s a five minute Hassidic-flavored fable before the opening credits, a cinematic Rosetta Stone, done entirely in the mother tongue. Both loving and mocking, the vignette is set in 19^th century Eastern Europe and is basically a slow dance between the dreamy transcendence of Marc Chagall paintings and the unrelenting terror of dybbuks. A period piece made with Day-Glo exclamation marks. Call it a DNA sample drawn from memories of Jewish life in the shtetls where the industrial revolution never happened and pogroms and poverty did. Could it be that the Coens’ are coming out of the post-modern closet and revealing themselves as Jewish storytellers? It’s arguably the most surreal and shocking thing they’ve ever done.

Fast forward three generations to 1950’s America. The advert for the movie says it all: the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is fiddleless on the roof of his suburban tract home, TV aerial like a sail above his head, Noah searching the horizon for dry land. His body bristles with Stallonean grit but it’s oozing Rick Moranis from the gills, an unlikely hero in service of a hopelessly lost cause, a truly serious man. He’s Tevye dropped in the middle of Eisenhower’s America. Like red-shoed Dorothy in Emerald City, he’s a stranger in a very strange land, never quite at home. Gopnik’s wife and brother also have this quality, still wearing the psychological packing materials from the previous generation’s trek across the ocean to the Goldina Medina, America.

He’s a bit of an odd ball but easy to like, this Gopnik, a physics professor at a local college, a person who trusts mathematical equations to tell him when the sun is coming up rather than looking out the window. Stuhlbarg, who was the hedge fund consultant in the black comedy Cold Souls, plays him as the fruit of the tree of Jewish manhood: intelligent and unrelentingly fair, polite and helpful to everyone, even when attacked. A mensch. But there’s something off about the guy. He comes across both as comically inept like Nicholas Cage in the Coens’ Raising Arizona (1987) and virtuously inept like Billy Bob Thornton in the brothers’ 2001 film, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

And so it goes.

Like the aging hippie in The Big Lebowski who calls himself The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Gopnik pays a big price for not melting into the pot. He endures an endless series of bizarre things, all of them painful, as he gets wised up. His wife decides to leave him for another man (played with perfect pitch by Fred Melamed as an unctuous conniver). His brilliant, nutty brother (Richard Kind) has a criminal streak (Kind also plays a similar character on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm). A student tries to bribe Gopnik to get a passing grade, and when he’s turned down, sabotages his teacher’s tenure review.

There are some truly funny moments in all this but there’s never any emotional pay-off for all the nasty stuff Gopnik goes through. The movie ends in the middle of nowhere as if the film makers just got tired of beating him up. It’s hard to fathom why the Coens’ made Gopnik likeable but don’t seem to like him themselves.

Near the end of the film, as the exhausted, cornered Gopnik teeters on the brink of finally accepting the bribe, we see him in his physics classroom covering a blackboard as big as a racquetball court with an elaborate proof of the uncertainty principle. He ends by telling the class that he’s just proved that nothing exists but that, in the end, doesn’t mean anything either.

The brothers are spot on in depicting the superficiality of lower middle class tract home life and the not-so-quiet desperation of its denizens, the feints and ululations of emptiness and alienation. Here they have returned to the scene of the crime in this film, the other side of the emotional tracks from Leave it to Beaver, closer to Revolutionary Road, laying bare the roots of the murderous glee of Fargo and the utter bleakness of No Country for Old Men.

The film ends with the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, a song that shows up frequently in the movie, almost a character for the role it plays in liberating Gopnik’s son from his parents’ world and, surprisingly, linking him to his Eastern European forebears. Quoth the Airplane: “When the truth is found to be lies/ and all the joy within you dies/ don’t you want somebody to love?”

Well, sure. But in the Coens’ world love seems to be just another shell game, and personal integrity never quite antes up.

Amelia

Starring Hilary Swank, Richard Gere; Directed by Mira Nair; 111 minutes

There are two pioneering women crossing the Atlantic Ocean in this film. One is the title character, Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), a Kansas native, the first woman to fly across the pond. The other is Mira Nair, the film’s director (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding), the first Indian woman to make a movie about Americans.

Earhart made her historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, about a year after Charles Lindbergh’s epochal jaunt. America fell head over heels in love with her, just the way it had with gallant, modest Lindbergh, and she became an instant inspiration to millions, a mythic swan soaring above the horizon lines of cash and class, the festering scabs of World War One.

The funny thing is that she did it as a passenger in a plane with two others, not as a solo pilot like Lindbergh, but never mind. America was hungry for a “Lady Lindy” and Amelia filled the bill. The film takes care to show us that flying was Earhart’s one true and only real love and setting aviation records her deepest passion.

There have been umpteen biopics about Earhart, a charmed, reckless, ultimately self-destructive person who died young (like James Dean and Michael Jackson) and who still has star power after she’s shuffled off the mortal coil. Amelia is the BBC version of this classic America tale: the exuberance of fearless, questing youth translated into the tragic, cold fire of Laurence of Arabia, more shadow than light. That said, Nair has made a lovely, overstuffed sofa of a film in the Merchant Ivory style, every frame brimming with opulence and comfort. Even minor characters are beautifully dressed, their clothing like supple architecture. Voiceovers of the actual words Earhart wrote and spoke about her flying experience add human feeling, even magic, to what is typically AOK. A nice touch.

Hilary Swank plays Earhart with a homespun elegance. She’s willful without ever being strident, sounding British even without an accent. An undeclared feminist just after women had won the right to vote, Earhart famously gave her husband a written note at their wedding ceremony freeing him, and herself, from living by medieval codes of faithfulness. She was a force of nature as certain and silent as the capillaries moving blood through vital organs, needing neither permission nor forgiveness.

Swank is 10 years into a career that began with a breathtaking, gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards (the other was for Million Dollar Baby). The challenge of playing Earhart was to stay strictly within a narrow personality while somehow acting like there were no boundaries at all. A finely calibrated performance.

Richard Gere plays Amelia’s husband, George Putnam, the PR maven behind Earhart’s commercial success. He initially saw her as a heroic spokesperson for the inchoate air travel industry. He also knew a brand when he saw one, and used her to sell books and air travel products. A meal ticket, in other words. But Putnam, although a couple of decades Amelia’s senior, also fell in love with her, and kept proposing until she agreed to marry him.

Gere plays Putnam with a genteel, faintly patrician FDR-style accent, a welcome variation on the classy but commercially crass character he played in Chicago (and a hike from his nimble, nuanced work in An Officer and a Gentleman). It’s a role that doesn’t call for very much beyond absolute devotion to the heroine. Like Stanley Tucci playing Julia Child’s husband in “Julie/Julia,” what’s needed are male cups deliberately not runneth over at a female party. Still, quite a serviceable supporting role (both).

Earhart’s relationship with Putnam is complicated by her affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor), an aviation pioneer about Amelia’s age (and father of writer Gore Vidal). Some of Earhart’s biographers think that Gene was the love of her life although she ultimately chose to be with Putnam; they also talk about Earhart’s close relationships with her sister (who called her ‘Meelie’) and mother, and Putnam’s two offspring from his first marriage, her stepsons. None of this is in the film, hard to fathom from a director whose previous films showed a talent for slowly revealing underlying layers of emotion, some not so pretty. The price of a ticket west across the Atlantic?

Capitalism: A Love Story

Capitalism: A Love Story is a connect-the-dots expose of the Wall Street players who conspired to invent credit default swaps and then used them to conduct a cruel financial war against regular people like you and me. It’s an engaging if uneven piece of cinematic activism. Think of it as An Inconvenient Truth with Michael Moore in the Al Gore role, Huffington Post not Washington Post, Woody Allen merged with Ralph Nader.

MM is the clown prince of documentary film making and America’s self-appointed social conscience. He’s a provocateur, this fat, goofy-looking guy, a man more wedded to the emotional truth than facts, the left’s Rush Limbaugh.

The film’s title echoes Enemies: A Love Story, director Paul Mazursky’s story about a Holocaust survivor’s doomed struggle to love again after the Nazi horror show. While Capitalism is just as bleak and angry in places as Enemies, as haunted by brutality, it’s also full of humor, compassion and optimism. It is arguably MM’s best film to date.

There’s a kind of murder mystery at the heart of Capitalism, an almost gleeful dissection of how the economic meltdown happened and who’s to blame. In one Super-Size Me type sequence, pictures of top shelf Goldman Sachs execs are laid out like cards on a Vegas gaming table, circles and arrows showing how these folks got each other rich at taxpayer expense. The facts are not new but laughing about the absurdity of the situation is.

Like The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris’s pioneering documentary, Capitalism keeps drilling down into the bedrock of things. Morris’s film actually helped to free an innocent man sent to death row for a murder he did not commit. Moore’s film will probably not trundle any more Bernie Madoff’s off to jail but, then again, President Obama has already told us to just move on.

By my count, capitalism is defined as an “evil” half a dozen times in the movie, including twice by different priests and once by a bishop, authorities on the subject. Moore himself uses the word “revolution” at least three times during the film, although it’s not clear if he invokes Lenin or the Beatles. Either way, his goal is to foment political action and he uses many different tactics to get the job done.

The Merry Prankster routines were my personal favorite, Yippie-like stunts worthy of ‘60’s anti-Wall Street activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. LOL stuff like wrapping the perimeter of AIG’s headquarters in crime scene tape. Or showing up with a big canvas bag at Bank of America, all innocent and cuddly, come to take our taxpayer bailout money back.

MM works hard to humanize the stats we hear about foreclosures and unemployment by interviewing people suffering the consequences of the financial meltdown. Much of this takes place in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan, one of GM’s many former factory towns. This community had already been devastated before the meltdown back when the plant closed, the American Dream baited and switched. There are some touching scenes with MM and his father surveying the elder Moore’s former worksite, now a pitted, featureless place with all traces of the factory, its workers and Main Street unfathomably and irretrievably gone.

In one of the film’s most remarkable moments, we see a disabled worker and his family being evicted from their home. Like millions of others, they gullibly gobbled up a variable mortgage thinking it was a bargain and ended up drowning in rising payments. Dead broke, no place to go, the man says he understands how people could get a gun and go postal. But, he adds quickly, it won’t be me. In other words, he’s mad as hell but willing to take it some more. Other interviewees echo his bewildered, neutered anger. And so, sad to say, do most of us. Does anyone really know what to do next? Does our government? Does the free market?

Well, Michael Moore does. For him capitalism is a monster on the once shining hill of American democracy, and it’s gotta go before it kills us and the planet earth. Sure, the message is hyperbolic and the messenger suspect, but so is a $700 billion bailout of the financial elite that created the meltdown in the first place. One thing seems clear: our nation’s financial crisis is part of a much more serious default in our democratic system of checks and balances. Capitalism is a contemporary version of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, rousing us citizens from our political slumber to fight for our rights and America’s health and moral integrity. We push the snooze bar at our peril.

NOTE: If this subject interests you but MM does not, I have heard good things about (but not seen) a more traditional documentary, American Casino.

The Informant!

Movies that use an exclamation point in their title are usually about average people pulling off amazing things, like the soccer movie Goal!, or something so far over-the-top as to be laughable, like Airplane! The Informant!, director Steven Soderbergh’s new film, is both at the same time. That’s very unusual and may qualify for an exclamation point all in itself.

The Informant! is based on the true story of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), President of Archer Daniels Midland’s BioProducts Division, one of the profit centers of a $62 billion food processing behemoth. Basically, it’s a big-time corporate scam dressed up as a farce, with a twist that would bring tears to the eyes of Gordon Gekko, the “Greed is good” guy in Oliver Stone’s movie Wall Street.

Whitacre is the film’s hero and its goat, a truly odd duck. A former biochemist in his late 30’s, he is likable and smart as Damon plays him, a seemingly harmless energizer bunny of a man eager to please all those he’ll meet on his way to the tippity top of the food chain. The Eagle Scout in him turns whistleblower for the FBI when he finds himself as a player in an ADM inspired price-fixing conspiracy. But this scout also owns a loopy Machiavellian Merit Badge, and that’s the reason he rats out his buddies, not ethics. He sees it as an easy way to clear out the competition for the top spot at ADM! And while all this is going on, right under the nose of the FBI, he decides to skim some scam for himself.

Way too strange to be true. Whitacre reminds me of John Nash (Russell Crowe) in “A Beautiful Mind,” a self-deluded/ chemically imbalanced man clever enough to make up stories that make his delusions seem real to himself and his peers. Even though we movie watchers eventually figure out what he’s up to, we never really get much of a sense of what Whitacre is feeling about anything. There doesn’t appear to be an emotional there there. For all we know, Whitacre was a genetically engineered executive grown in a secret ADM lab and dropped into a suit, a poster boy for the Science Geeks Association.

Much of the movie is about Whitacre wearing a wire and walking one. He shuttles back and forth between meeting with ADM’s top dogs and meeting with his FBI handlers, always the same earnest person, always plausible even when spinning stories from thin air. Soderbergh documents this dance in an almost documentary style, using very tight, grainy shots and flat lightning. It felt like the director had taken a cinematic Alka Seltzer after all that eye candy in his boffo box office films, Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13.

The talented Mr. Damon gained 30 pounds for this role, shedding his normally lean and hungry look to become stocky and stiff-jointed. He doesn’t walk so much as float like a Macy’s parade balloon, head always slightly ahead of his body, his legs trailing along behind. I found it amazing that the man who played the sleek, lethal secret agent Jason Bourne in the Bourne Identity, was also this porked up little guy with the aviator glasses and a milquetoast mustache.

Although Damon’s Whitacre is not as fully realized as Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk or Meryl Streep’s Julia Childs, it’s still a great performance and worth seeing. We can only hope that the intelligence, agility and vulnerability of Damon’s riveting performance in “Good Will Hunting” finds more fertile scripts in the future. Has there ever been an actor that can look so clean and bright no matter how deep the do-do?

The ADM guys running the scam are all overweight lightweights, jocular, dull and cold-blooded like Tony Soprano’s posse. But Soderbergh denies his scammers the frosted hair and goofy nicknames, the reverence for Mother, which makes movie thugs seem ridiculous and less scary. He strips them down to the bare wiring, these hallow, stuffed men panting after the Grail.

Marvin Hamlisch’s Tin Pan Alleyesque musical score does its best to prod us into seeing the Keystone Cops nuttiness of this scam and Whitacre’s even nuttier efforts to exploit it. But it just isn’t funny. Worse, it doesn’t seem sad either. It felt like Erin Brockovitch (2000), Soderbergh’s first big box office success, with all the anger and moral outrage washed out.

I left the theater feeling dazed and confused. But that is how I often feel when thinking about credit-default swaps, Enron, junk bonds, et.al. How do people like Whitacre and the price fixers get away with their scams for so long? And why have we taxpayers continued to give ADM billions in annual subsidies even after the company has been convicted of rigging the game? Isn’t anyone watching the store?

The Informant! lets us feel what it’s like to be inside the erratic, disturbed heart pulsing at the center of ADM’s world, the same world we live in too. Maybe the exclamation point in the title is a cry for help.

Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino was 31 in 1994 when his film Pulp Fiction was nominated for three Academy Awards and he was anointed the Wunderkind of American cinema. Like fellow writer/director/actor Wunderkinds Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) and Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), Tarantino invented a new, audaciously hip visual story telling language. And like them, he seems to have lost his groove, and his box office, after early success.

Inglorious Basterds is something of a comeback film for Tarantino after his sojourn in the world of high concept, high fashion violence in the Kill Bill films (2003-4). It’s an ambitious, alternative history of World War Two, a more down to earth revenge saga in love with film history. The movie is driven as much by style as by story, a real treat for the eye even when the plot boils over and characters morph into caricature.

There’s much to like in this film. The opening scenes, set in rural, Nazi-occupied France, are beautiful and calm, and very unTarantino-like. Enter Colonel Hans Landa (the tri-lingual German actor Christoph Waltz) who is paying a visit to a farm in search of a Jewish family he believes is hiding in the basement there.

We’ve all seen this horrible set-up enough to know where it goes. But Tarantino makes Landa genuinely gracious, an almost New Age Nazi man, who treats his farmer/victim like a mensch. Still, Landa is a Nazi and Tarantino is fascinated by violence. What’s different is that the inevitable Quentintine fury of beautifully choreographed bullets eviscerates only wood, not human beings. We do not see any murders, perhaps a first in a Tarantino film.

While the gun smoke still lingers over the farm house like a toxic sunset, Landa sees a young woman running away from the slaughter into an open field. But rather than using his pistol, he smiles cryptically, choosing to let her go. It left this viewer wondering what the heck Landa was up to. It was the high point of the movie for me, and I was literally on the edge of my seat.

We meet the young escapee, Shoshanna Dreyfus (played by the French actress Melanie Laurent), several years later as the owner of a small movie theater in Paris. Tarantino films her on a tall wooden ladder, dreamily changing the letters of a movie title on the marquee. The muted theater lights barely make a dent in the inky, empty street. It was quite a touching scene, a fragile moment of hope amid war rendered with great simplicity and power.

In conventional war movies, this is where the heroine meets her true love. Here Shoshanna meets Private Fredrich Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), a young German solider who has become a celebrity for killing hundreds of Americans. There’s no way Shoshanna will be attracted to the handsome, smitten Fredrich because, well, he’s a Nazi. Undeterred, in an effort to win her heart, Zoller persuades none other than Josef Goebbels, the brains behind Hitler, to use Shoshanna’s theater for the premiere of a movie he’s produced about Zoller’s exploits, with the young hero starring as himself.

It’s an offer she dare not refuse and even Hitler eventually piles on to the planned festivities, his entourage of ghastly thugs in tow.

This is where the movie started to unravel and spiral out of control. By putting all his sappily stereotyped Nazi big shots in Shoshanna’s theater at one time, Tarantino gives her a shot at avenging her family’s murder. They deserve it, of course, but this set-up is too ridiculous to believe. It’s like the scene in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service where ten different people come into the room one after another, toppers on top of toppers. And Tarantino adds even another layer to this already overloaded scene: a cadre of 12 Jewish-American soldiers who have their own plan to kill the Nazi high command.

These are the eponymous Basterds, guys who look like they’re waiting for the express bus back to Long Island after a day’s work in Midtown. But the formerly nice Jewish boys have been transformed by the horrors of genocide. They are like John Goodman’s para-military Jew, Walter, in the Cohn Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, both laughable and lethal. One of them, called the Bear Jew (Eli Roth), kills German soldiers with a baseball bat, probably a Martin Scorsese model. They creep us out even as we root for them to succeed, which probably says more about us than it does about them. Jewish mothers are advised not to take any of this personally.

And so it goes. Quentin Tarantino is himself an inglorious basterd, an ironic Hollywood
bad boy with a real passion for subverting societal (and cinematic) conventions. He wears this title as a badge of honor and believes it gives him the license to do pretty much anything to shock, dazzle or amaze us, or gross us out entirely. Personally, I wish QT’s films weren’t so hyped up on Darwinian adrenalin, the kill or be killed call of our animal nature. But then he wouldn’t be Quentin Tarantino, he’d be Stanley Kubrick.

District 9 (2009)

Starring: Sharlto Copely, Jason Cope. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Produced by Key Creatives. 112 minutes. MPAA “R’ rating. Parent’s Advisory for profanity, violence and gore, and frightening/intense scenes.

The extraterrestrials in the sci-fi film District 9 are taken captive by the South African army without a fight and incarcerated in squalid refuge camps in Johannesburg. The locals call the extraterrestrials Prawns but, cinematically, they are more like gefilte fish. All Prawns are slender and tall with wide shoulders and fetching wasp waists like the robots in I Robot. They have veil-like tentacles over their mouth, same as the bad boy in Predator, and they speak a clickier, less guttural dialect of Klingon. Their skin is horny and plaited like the Ninja Turtles and they have hooves like the aliens in Contact.

The one really unique thing about Prawns is that they roll over so quickly. Their name caries more than whiff of terms like Kaffir and Sami, toxic slang full of the triumphalist racial fear and loathing that fueled apartheid, the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, holocausts of every size and shape. These visitors from another world are treated with the thwackingly punitive disdain that non-humans deserve in a zero sum game for dominance of planet Earth.

Humans neutralize the Prawns in District 9 because they are understandably afraid of a civilization that has mastered interplanetary travel. We know in our bones that human history is the story of stronger nations conquering weaker ones, and that conquest is usually driven by an advanced technology of some kind, iron over bronze, wheel over foot, guns over swords. Prawns are a trophy species, something in a cage to amuse and distract people from their troubles, another feather in the cap that humans believe is the crown of creation.

But Prawns still must earn their keep like everyone else on planet Earth, and their novel alien biology makes them cash cows, rare commodities which can be easily converted to a handsome profit. The aliens’ claw-like hands are hacked off, for example, and sold as a kind of power bar. There’s also a thriving trade among sexual adventurers drawn to the flame of alien bordellos. But this stuff is chump change compared to figuring out how to operate the cache of rifle-like Prawn weapons that have been captured, gizmos with the kick of the Ghostbusters’ nuclear-powered backpacks but painted like boogie boards.

Director Blomkamp’s film is high-spirited but gory like RoboCop but nicely balanced by dollops of crisp, CNN-style news reportage, also like RoboCop. The film really works as an R-rated, entertaining sci-fi/action/comedy/thriller/moral fable.

A field agent named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our hero, a bureaucrat quirky enough to be likable. He is the lead government employee tasked with moving 1.8 million Prawns to a new camp, District 10. The real motive in this operation is to disrupt any guerilla activities in the planning stages, and Wikus finds plenty of ingenious weapons systems made from spare parts including an elaborate computer network. The plot hinges on his accidentally ingesting the fruit of a jerry rigged chemistry lab, a very nasty black liquid, and then physically beginning to morph into a Prawn.

Life is never easy for cross-genome dressers. The humans in Wikus’ life, including his wife, toss him overboard pretty fast and the Prawns don’t trust him either. But Wikus can at least live as an outlaw among the Prawns and buy cat food (a Prawn delicacy) from the Nigerian warlords who are the aliens’ commercial brokers with the outside world. Pretty quickly, Wikus discovers that Prawns care about their friends and children and hate being bullied by police but go along with it to avoid further trouble.
In other words, accoutrement aside, the Prawns have a certain sensitivity that we recognize as being human and the humans who control the Prawns’ act with an insensitivity that can only be called alien.

Suffice it to say, like Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Wikus becomes more sympathetic to the Prawns as he experiences the cruelty inflicted on him as a non-human with alien parts. So does the viewer. The mind reels, the heart convulses, somehow history slogs on. When will we ever learn?

Back in the day, there were three reasons why extraterrestrials would pop by the Earth: to destroy humans (War of the Worlds, et.al), enslave us (The Matrix) or to help us grow up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, et.al). The aliens in District 9 aren’t monsters, missionaries or messiahs. The Prawns are strangers in a strange land but it’s the humans that are truly strange, and really scary. Scarier still, we are the only ones with the power to save us from ourselves.