DISTRICT 9 Alien Backstory

Neill Blomkamp has created one of the most talked about and anticipated new and ORIGINAL films this year. District 9 is a full feature adaptation inspired by a short movie he made a few years back entitled Alive In Joberg, which is about an alien race that is forced to live on Earth after their ship lands. Neill gives a little bit more on the back story to the aliens in his upcoming film District 9.
Neill explains what the aliens are like, what there home world was like, and why they ended up here on Earth.
The hive mind [concept] is the most important thing to me, because I love the idea of a civilization that can build all of that technology and then, at the same time, just have a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own. I found that to be a really interesting concept. Also, it sort of explains why they don’t turn on the humans. Individually, they may be feeling oppressed, but they don’t have it together enough to form a resistance and back one another. So I found that really interesting.
I think that they do have a home planet, it’s pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they’ll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there’s much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.
The other thing is that the ship was meant to clip together with other ships. So there’s, like, vast amounts of resources that they’re bringing to the parent planet. And the ship, when the army generals or the queen of that particular ship died off by some sort of virus or bacteria that they picked up on some other planet, that killed them off. And it didn’t effect these sort of resilient, hardy sort of drone workers. Then the technology is usually the thing that they relied on to save them, but in this case it sort of screwed them because it brought them to a planet that kind of treated them pretty badly, but it was the ship that realized that, unless it gets to a life sustaining planet everything is going to die, which is a cool idea. So the ship just auto pilots to the closest one in the Goldilocks band, and it’s our planet and then pulls up and hits the breaks.
He also goes on to explain how their society may be able to adapt to this new world.
I think it’s taken 20 years. I think because there is a subconscious hive mind happening, really what they should do is lay one egg that has a different embryo in it that grows into a Queen or being someone that dictates direction. But I think in the interim, because they may have done that, there may be an egg out there with that, but as that being is growing, I just like the idea that he may have been a lot more directionless in the beginning. But the hive structure of their society may just pick one or two that starts to become the leader. Like the overall structure of his brain may change because the hive may want that to happen. So he starts having a direction and a goal. Which is an interesting idea and it’s just enough to kick start them to be able to get to the ship to get back.
District 9 opens here in the U.S. on August 14 and I cant wait to see it.
Source: IO9
Comments(5)
Effin awesome
Does not seem like he has really thought it through.
Why think it through when you can focus on the kick-ass weaponry and explosions???
It should have been a conscious point in the movie, but unconsciously it points to the fact that mankind needs much progression to be wise enough to interact with an alien lifeform. Sadly it's believable that humans' main concern would be figuring out how to use the alien weapon biotechnology. Time for us to grow up!!!!!
A science fiction movie does not have to be 100% fleshed out a la JRR Tolkien's Middle-Earth. When you think of the classics like Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, and so forth, the viewers are given a lot of tantalizing details and left to fill in the blanks with imagination. The most important thing aside from plot (which applies to almost any movie, really) is that the parts of the universe which we see have to appear to represent a believable whole. I thought most of it did, except the idea that a private corporation would have charge of EVERYTHING concerning aliens. Surely the UN would have more of a hand in it.
My idea as to why Christopher wasn't able do more is that while the aliens did evolve from animals with a hive-like social structure, over the millenia as their civilization developed, they came to depend on technology for mass communications, so with the ship broken and powered off he/it couldn't organize them effectively.
Did you know that if there is no queen in some insect colonies, one of the non-queens will physically undergo a change to become a queen?