Thanks to the miracle of Netflix, Isabel and I watched the sci-fi, racial satire District 9 last night (I know, what a romantic pregame show for Valentine's Day).
It was a good film, although it certainly had some rough edges. The biggest flaws of the movie are probably glossed over by generic defenses. In my opinion, there were a lot of improbable situations (even for "speculative fiction" as the kids like to call it these days) that one excuses because of the movie's function as racial commentary rather than bona fide science fiction. The film also had some awkward pacing due to its shifting back and forth between faux-documentary and non-documentary presentation. For the first twenty minutes or so, the whole film is presented as interviews, security camera footage, and clips of "COPS" style recordings...then it would abruptly cut to scenes that were clearly not recorded by anyone, but were necessary to advance the story and moments of dramatic irony.
This lent the movie an element that reminded me of Adaptation, moving from realism to convention in a rapid turnabout. District 9 started as a fairly avaunt guard artsy-fartsy take on space aliens, but quickly transformed itself into a summer action flick. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as the documentary style was a bit plodding.
But enough about aesthetics. I wanted to blog about one scene in particular. Early in the film, the somewhat bumbling and ignorantly racist protagonist is sent to evict the aliens from District 9--an alien refugee camp unfortunately situated in South Africa (the racial questions are writ large). It becomes clear that the eviction process is about more than just relocation. The government agents turn it into an opportunity to confiscate alien technology and...in a very disturbing scene...inflict population control.
The protagonist, named Wikus, and his assistants uncover a shed being used to incubate alien embryos. The embryos are in large pods that require external mechanisms for nourishment. Wikus explains the shed to the camera crew with the relish of the Crocodile Hunter. He then starts removing the nutrient tubes, and gives an order for the shed to be burned. As the pods are destroyed, infantile screeches can be heard, and Wikus laughingly jokes that the pods pop like popcorn in the heat. He explicitly refers to the process as "aborting" the aliens, but he has no qualms with the procedure. A viewer would have to be pretty sadistic, though, not to feel as though Wikus has just done something morally repugnant.
Now, this doesn't make the movie unwaveringly pro-life. The horror of the scene is not just in the screeches of dying babies--it is the ignorant hubris of a government official imposing abortion by force. Someone had been maintaining the incubation shed--someone had chosen that the embryos should thrive, but that freedom of choice is being trampled on by a self-serving government. Whether aliens would be morally justified if they intentionally destroyed their own pods or deprived them of nutrition is another matter and not dealt with in the movie.
Nevertheless, the scene doesn't depict abortion as a particularly merciful act. In this film, alien abortion is only depicted as the destruction of another, unique, self-aware individual. When the embryo is represented as a separate entity--in this case, literally external to a mother's womb--it is unquestionably a form of murder in the film. Whether or not it is morally justified is left up to the audience to determine.
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