Alien - Ridley Scott

There are at least two reasons why it's worth watching Alien today, almost 35 years after its original release:

• It offers a very sand view of the future. Humankind is finally able to travel across the Universe, but social inequalities are still there: the movie is nothing else but the story of a group of miners who have to risk their lives at the orders of their employer.
• It reminds us that a good horror movie is the one where you barely see the threat. At one point in time, directors of horror movies got the idea that their job was to do fancy stuff with special effects. They're wrong, and they should watch Alien over and over until they understand why.

Elysium - Neill Blomkamp

I've read mixed reviews of Elysium. Though I personally liked the movie, one can make the case that it oversold its political agenda. The special effects are OK.

The only negative comment I can make about Elysium is the disconnect between the plea for a more solidary World on immigration, health care, human rights, and democracy, and the insipidity of Max, the hero. The problem is that Max is not trying to save the World but does it almost by accident; the fundamental problem of the Elysium dystpia i shta nobody is trying to do anything to improve the living conditions of the peoople living in Earth. Max just wants to heal himself, and when he realizes he has no hope that he decides to save the life of his friend's daughter. The guys who get health care for the people on Earth are Max's friends. Max really couldn't care less.

Elysium could have been a movie about resistance, about the left-behinds trying to take back what they could legitimately consider as theirs. Instead, we are offered a pathetic version of the Mexican-American Dream: a guy trying to go by himself to the place where the rich guys live. Blomkamp has reportedly said that Elysium is an allegory of life on Earth today. If he really thinks that collective action to improve the World is impossible, and that the only way things can improve is through fortunate coincidences, then he's probably more part of the problem than he realizes.

District 9 - Neill Blompkamp

District 9 is one of the best science fiction films ever made, and it was the big thing in the summer of 2009. The critiques about it were overwhelmingly positive, with the exception of those made by Nigerians, who complained that their fellow countrymen were depicted as cannibal gangsters -District 9 was actually forbidden in Nigeria.

One of the reasons behind the success of District 9 is that, it is a movie with a story, where special effects are just an ingredient of a plot instead of its central object. Think about Independence Day, which is the quintessential special effects movie, with a very basic story: aliens come to destroy the Earth and we must stop them. In Independence Day, the story basically serves the purposes of the special effects designer: the images of the White House exploding in the middle of an alien attack comes back to memory more easily than any part of the plot. If nothing else, the value of District 9 is that it tears down the idea that science fiction is inherently connected with special effects. They're not, but most people think they are because that's the way Hollywood has taught us to think about movies. An action movie with not-over-the-roof special effects can be successful if the story is good enough.

The comparison with Independence Day is interesting from an ideological perspective too. Filmed in the middle of the 1990s, a period of American hubris, the message is pretty straightforward: aliens are entities who come to destroy our World and we must be afraid of them. In fact, we will destroy them on our own because we are the only power on Earth. By the way, by "we" I mean "Americans." On the other hand, District 9, filmed after the dreams of a South African Rainbow Nation were shattered by reality, shows that aliens can be used as cheap labor and exploited, even in poor countries. Multinational corporations and mercenaries ("private security contractors") are used to deal with them. Aliens may not necessarily be evil, but since they are not human, they don't deserve equal treatment or entitlement to any rights whatsoever. It is interesting how the historical context and the country of origin determine how an encounter between aliens and humans will go over. I wonder how a Russian or a Syrian alien movie would look like.

Some people have tried to see a metaphor of South Africa's migration policies in this movie, but since the writer and the director have denied any political message in it, I won't talk about it.

Another reason for the exit of District 9 is having a good producer: Peter Jackson, who also produced the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The website of District 9 is here, and is actually really fun.