District 9 Review

It has been a while since I've written a movie review. It's been a while since I've seen a movie that moved me to ponder a long time after. Mind you, I watched a copy that did not have the subtitled translations for the aliens' speech. Surprisingly I still enjoyed the film. When you begin to watch it, you will find yourself hating or maybe irritated by the main actor Wikus, either because of his accent or his cheery but condescending demeanor towards the prawns (aliens). But when the shit hits the fan, you will tend to root for the poor sucker as he falls into his abyss of trouble.

If you're the kind of person who is looking for a straight-out alien invasion, or action movie, turn away from District 9, because it is way more than that. As disgustingly gross the aliens are in this movie, you will also see the humans as the enemy, a reflection of humanity's fervent effort to capitalize on resources made available to them. District 9 poses, forgive me if I may sound pretentious, a question of humanity and what it means to be human, regardless of its relative definition. The movie is about the struggle to survive and our fear of the unknown. We see the humans in the movie find all these unused alien weapons and yet the authorities continue to treat the aliens as uncivilized, unintelligent, scum of the universe, which do not deserve rights as a being of intelligence and culture should receive.

What is humanity? Intelligently, culturally and/or morally superior of other species? Looking at the treatment of these aliens in the movie and even people of relative culture, ethnicity and gender in our real lives, does it make us really human? Another recent film addressed similar ideas - James Cameron's Avatar. But you become easily overwhelmed by the graphical nature of that film. And seriously, humanoid-cat looking aliens...making out...gross. Whereas District 9 is not afraid to get down and dirty. The aliens in this movie were not meant to be beautiful in any way, neither was the land they occupied utopic. So if you're not afraid to re-consider what humanity has become through the years, pick-up a copy of District 9 and decide for yourself.

Pride. Everyone has it. Everyone. But sometimes, you might forget. C'est la vie.

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I'm overworked, underpaid, under-appreciated and unintelligible. But somehow, I feel blessed. Wonder why....

I'm tired, so fucking tired.

I do not know how to say this besides how it is. A guitar string broke today. The 6th. It seems to be a sign of impending doom in my pursuit to conceive a skill in creating music. Sure, there are 5 more strings, but each does not signify a life; 5 out of 6. You need all 6 to play it. Instead it is now 1 piece short of a whole and thus cannot live on. Of course it can be repaired, but this begs the question: will it be the same as before? The horror of it breaking and its repetition continues to torment me. I've put the guitar aside. Not wishing to see the damage even though it already has burnt itself a hole in my head. There is no hurry, there is time, I tell myself rather unconvincingly. I will take care of it another day. Procrastination, you might call it, pessimists would refer to it as delaying the inevitable.

Dear God, give me strength.

Every single endeavour we undertake, out of passion and not our abnormal human quirks, we perform with the slight consciousness that it would affect the future of our genetic line. We seek knowledge, we pray and preach, we take risks with our wealth and our lives, not for any rational self-benefit but with hope that the descendants of our kind may live in a better world. We fight our wars, of strengths and wit, we conserve life, preserving nature's best and it is too hard to simply point these as altruistic acts in our endless desire to prove that there are better ways to live. We save, engineer, innovate, do it all, for the kids. Tell a mother that she needs to die for her child to live and she will not hesitate for a moment. But tell the same mother that her child needs to die to save others and the task would be gauged for much longer. We make similar choices everyday, if you think about it. The question is, are we trying too hard? We try to believe that providing our future generation with entities of which we ourselves did not enjoy in our time would enrish their lives. Are they? And is there such a thing as trying too hard? Right now, I think the real challenge is merely getting through the day.