As the Academy awards
are nearing, it seems appropriate
to ask which one is
better: James Cameron’s,
Avatar vs. Peter Jackson’s,
District 9? In my opinion,
its District 9 all the way;
Avatar isn’t even in the
same class, except for its
spectacular special effects.
District 9 kept me in rapt
attention with surprise after
surprise, Avatar merely
entertained me with a fairly
predictable story line.
These films have similar
themes: conflict between
humans and aliens. On a
psychological level, the
theme of the two is conflict
between the forces of reason
and empathy versus the
forces of prejudice,
unthinking disregard,
avarice and exploitation.
Unlike what continues to
happen in the real world,
the forces of reason and
empathy win out in both
movies.
In Avatar, we go to the
aliens, the Na’vi, a preindustrial
people, who live
on Pandora (in real-life a
satellite of Saturn}, in
District 9, the aliens, pejoratively
called Prawns for
their facial and other
resemblance to that shellfish,
become stranded on
Earth and become relegated
to a slum detention
camp.Both movies are apt
metaphors for white the
white Europeans’ and their
descendants’ horrendous
treatment of Native
Americans on two continents.
Avatar is very much the
story of the white man
pushing the Native
Americans off their lands
and destroying or exploiting
their habitat and natural
resources. The humans
push the Na’vi (Navaho?)
off of their lands and
destroy the forests in
Avatar, just as our white
forbearers destroyed much
of the great forests and
grasslands that the Native
Americans called home.
District 9 picks up the
metaphor at a later date,
the segregation of Native
Americans into reservations,
a story which continues
through the present.
District 9 is the story of the
forced removal of aliens
from one ghetto to another.
Unlike the Na’vi, the
Prawns are a sophisticated
post-industrial race, as their
ability to travel through
Space indicates. The vast
majority of the stranded
Prawns, however, are unsophisticated
workers.
Both of their protagonists
(in District 9 he is Wikus,
played by Sharlto Copley,
and in Avatar he is Jake
Sully, played by Sam
Worthington), follow a
similar journey. They start
out as participants in the
mistreatment o the aliens
and slowly become their
supporters and advocates.
In Avatar, the inner emotions
and conflicts of the
protagonist, U.S. Marine
Jake Sully, are hardly ever
exposed. Action is emphasized
over emotion. In
District 9, Wikus is portrayed
as man who starts
out as an unquestioning,
middle-level bureaucrat
given a hopeless task, the
peaceful relocation of an
alien people that does not
understand the property
rules of white men.
As the conflict between
humans and aliens grows,
so does Wikus. His journey
to becoming a supporter
of the aliens is arduous,
one in which the movie
forces us to experience his
every emotional reaction.
Both of the movies have
similar villains, avaricious
corporate officials who are
willing to do anything,
even kill, in order to make
huge profits, and their military
mercenaries who are
willing, even eager, to do
what they do best: destroy;
kill; and, maim.
I found the appearance of
the aliens in Avatar to be
predictable and lacking in
imagination; their facial
features were human-like,
as were their oversized
bodies. I was struck by the
parallels between Avatar’s
aliens and popular images
of “American Indians” in
any one of a hundred westerns:
painted savages riding
bareback, their simple
bows and arrows no match
for a rapacious enemy with
mechanized tools of war.
Avatar was even replete
with “oogah booga” scenes
of a witch doctor performing
esoteric rituals, with
the masses swaying along.
The “Prawns,” the pejorative
for the aliens in
District 9, were much more
nuanced and crustaceanlike.
Their finely-rendered
details were are as far
from human-looking as can
be imagined. Their very
ugliness was off-putting at
first. But just as Wikus
did, the more that I got to
know about them, the more
sympathetic a race they
seemed.
Visual detail was one of
the things that set these
two pictures far apart.
While the action shots
were vivid and spectacular,
many of the scenes in
Avatar appeared more like
a Disney animation than a
camera-shot film. This distracted
my attention and
interfered with the allimportant
suspension of
disbelief which allows us
to experience, even if only
for a short while, the fiction
as reality.
The visual effect of District
9 is sharp, crisp. The comparison
between the two
movies reminds me of the
importance of resonant
detail that Bucks Professor
and Poet Chris Bursk
stresses to his creative
writing students. The
attention to detail in
District 9 strongly resonated,
the lack of detail in
Avatar did not.
The portrayal of conflict in
the two movies differed
significantly as well. In
Avatar, the conflict scenes
are mostly impersonal,
group against group. They
are large, spectacular even,
but they add little to the
psychological depth of the
movie. They are little
more than action scenes.
The portrayals of conflict
in District 9 were often
finely-rendered individual
conflicts between man and
alien, conflicts which
evoked the entire range of
human emotions and reactions:
fear, hatred, love,
compassion, callous disregard,
hope, and despair.
Undeniably, Avatar has
enjoyed and will continue
to enjoy much greater commercial
success than
District 9. But that is hardly
the proper measure of an
award-winning work of fiction,
as the book shelves
selling the latest popular
mystery thrillers attest. If
your taste is, like mine, for
finely-written novels, rich
in plot, psychological detail
and complex, often-conflicted
characters, human
or otherwise, then I think
that you will agree that
District 9 is by far the better
movie.