Partial Review, District 9
Somewhat against my better judgment, I took Tristan, Rory and Fin to see District 9 this afternoon, in return for mowing the lawn. This may not have been a great idea when I began the day by crying without much cause.
I had skimmed a few reviews that made it sound interesting - an alien movie with some serious philosophical preoccupations. District 9 is a shantytown in which a million aliens - tall, exoskeleton-bearing "prawns" - have been living, isolated and in squalor, since their ship came to a halt in the sky over Johannesburg twenty years before. The ship still hovers there, and a government bureau of alien management is in charge of enforcing the alien apartheid. In voice over "news reports" you hear that that something must have happened to change them before they arrived, because they show no initiative, have no morals and tend toward criminality and laziness (not to poke you in the eye too much with the metaphor).
But why, why, why does every action movie aimed at the under-40 crowd need to contain scenes of such awful emotional violence and torture? When the main character is infected with some sort of Prawnification fluid and begins to develop Prawn parts, he is overwhelmed with thrashing horror and terror, then tortured at the secret government experimental lab, where they force him with electric prods to use his Prawn arm to fire Prawn weapons while he sobs and begs to see his wife. They cut him and make him scream. It sickened me.
Anyway, that's when I bolted from the theater. It amazes me that people voluntarily expose themselves to these horrors when we know that the world is full of real suffering that is just as bad. Maybe the teenagers that go to these films don't know that the world is full of torment. Maybe they do, and these movies make them feel better about it.
Maybe this is just that eternal question, How can people be so different from me?
I spent the next hour crying on the phone to Toby and then browsing for books in B&N.
I had skimmed a few reviews that made it sound interesting - an alien movie with some serious philosophical preoccupations. District 9 is a shantytown in which a million aliens - tall, exoskeleton-bearing "prawns" - have been living, isolated and in squalor, since their ship came to a halt in the sky over Johannesburg twenty years before. The ship still hovers there, and a government bureau of alien management is in charge of enforcing the alien apartheid. In voice over "news reports" you hear that that something must have happened to change them before they arrived, because they show no initiative, have no morals and tend toward criminality and laziness (not to poke you in the eye too much with the metaphor).
But why, why, why does every action movie aimed at the under-40 crowd need to contain scenes of such awful emotional violence and torture? When the main character is infected with some sort of Prawnification fluid and begins to develop Prawn parts, he is overwhelmed with thrashing horror and terror, then tortured at the secret government experimental lab, where they force him with electric prods to use his Prawn arm to fire Prawn weapons while he sobs and begs to see his wife. They cut him and make him scream. It sickened me.
Anyway, that's when I bolted from the theater. It amazes me that people voluntarily expose themselves to these horrors when we know that the world is full of real suffering that is just as bad. Maybe the teenagers that go to these films don't know that the world is full of torment. Maybe they do, and these movies make them feel better about it.
Maybe this is just that eternal question, How can people be so different from me?
I spent the next hour crying on the phone to Toby and then browsing for books in B&N.