Science Fiction Double Feature

It's been a fine summer for Sci Fi movies (based on a sample size of two), so without any lengthy expositions let's get down to it. The movies for today are "Moon" and "District 9," seen within a week of each other due to the wonderful timeliness of my local movie theater and my friends who are willing to go drive to see current release films. The former is an exercise in genre, with a standard plot extremely well told, while the latter changes the rules and delivers a gritty and occasionally legitimately morally disturbing twist on alien stories as we know them.

So better late than never, let's start with "Moon." Unfortunately, I can't reveal which of the regulation science fiction plots "Moon" deals with for fear of revealing the story, but rest assured that it's familiar territory. However, it's not the story, it's how you tell it, and Duncan Jones (co-writer/director and apparently the son of David fucking Bowie) certainly knows how to tell a story. Sam Rockwell plays Sam (funny that), lunar resource miner. He's nearing the end of a three-year stint doing this mining stuff with no human company; instead, he has Kevin Spacey-voiced robot/helper GERTY, a more benevolent version of HAL (the comparison has been made before but is inevitable). But then there's an accident, and things start to get weird with the arrival of a second Sam, this one beginning his three-year stay. As original Sam's health declines and second Sam starts getting suspicious about fishy goings-on at the base the plot unfolds, and this is where I leave you to eventually see the movie. It's a little complex, but if you pay attention everything falls into place nicely, and there's a strong message of hope and sticking-it-to-the-man in the end. Another message: corporations are evil and exploitative. It's even a little thought-provoking, but mostly just a breath of fresh air for legitimate science fiction, even more production considering the extreme low budget (only really evident in a few iffy CGI moments). The acting is superb though- Kevin Spacey was born to voice robots, and Sam Rockwell does an incredible job playing the multiple parts. There must also be some fancy editing involved, as evidenced in the fact that original Sam can brawl with second Sam and all that I can worry about is that second/angrier Sam will hurt original Sam. So that's a testament to editing, camerawork and acting there. Definitely a good film though, beyond the limitations of genre stories, and well worth a look.

Staying with the promising young filmmakers theme (and hopefully with fewer parentheticals and hyphenated phrases), let's turn our attention to "District 9," a twist on the "aliens have landed" story full of social commentary and apartheid imagery. Another co-writer/director, Neill Blomkamp, is certainly visionary, although uncomfortably so. We get a world in which the aliens that land aren't bristling with hostility or boldly seeking to contact our civilization; instead, something has gone wrong, and a big ship full of sick/leaderless aliens lands over Johannesburg. Humanity doesn't know what to do with them, so we treat them as third-class citizens and shuttle them into a nice apartheid slum. Enter Wikus Van De Merwe, government bureaucrat in charge of moving the aliens now known as "prawns" (a nice bit of derogatory slang for the vaguely crustacean beings) into another encampment. Wikus takes on his task with zeal, finding ways of convincing the prawns to agree to eviction. The film at this point is documentary-styled, lending even more realism to what is a very gritty movie (the CGI is hardly intrusive at all, save some of the gory splatter effects that come later). But soon things get ugly: Wikus stumbles upon a canister and, in his zeal, gets squirted by mysterious alien technology goop and starts getting sick. When it turns out that he's manifesting prawn physical characteristics, the government contractor he works for essentially repossesses his body and whisks him off for a battery of unpleasant tasks. Here's where things get pretty unbearable. Not only does the film switch to conventional dramatic formula (no more documentary-style talking heads or "live footage"), but the social commentary and moral implications become unbearably heavy. The scenes in which Wikus is forced to test alien weaponry, especially on a live prawn, are both the worst as far as evil medical experiments since "The Host" (that I've seen) and make the soul squirm in revulsion. Sure, commentary is good, but is it necessary to be so damn explicit? Other scenes up to this point were also pretty bad, like brutality in the slums and casual hatred of the prawns; but things get better after this. Wikus meets up with another prawn, owner of the goop, and the two form an ass-kicking alliance so that they can both get the goop and turn Wikus back into a man (and so the prawn can, you know, do his own thing). This enables the commentary to take a new direction as Wikus becomes a reluctant freedom fighter (there's an especially Halo-esque assault on a building that's truly spectacular), but the message remains buried under a lot of gritty action that's hard to handle on a deep, emotional level.

In the end, I award "Moon" the distinction of better picture, because it has a bit more warmth and joy. Sure, both are fun and innovative (I use the word broadly) science fiction films, but "Moon" just had a little more joy about it. "District 9" may have pushed more limits, but the ultimate bleakness of the picture and the commentary were just a little too off-putting for my taste, which I like to think is geared towards the subtle. Both are fine films, just beware the sheen of violence designed for mass appeal.

So that's the last from me for a while I believe. I'm off to Bali in a few days, a fine place I'm sure, but one without lots of Western Popular Culture, which is of course the meat of this little blog-thing. Unless I feel particularly inspired by some form of pop culture over there, I think I'll be checking back in here in December, hopefully with lots of wonderfully weird indie-but-not-overly-so fare. Otherwise I've got the link for my Bali blog in the sidebar there, so if you want to check in with my trials and trepidations, feel free to go ahead. Otherwise we'll see how this western boy does in South Asia. Until December, over and out.