I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations

Actually, the title of this post is a lie. But it's a J. R. R. Tolkein quote, which makes it okay. Tolkein wrote it in the preface to the 2nd edition of LOTR, where he politely disagreed that the War of the Ring had anything to do with World War Two or whatnot, and pointed out that if it had resembled any real war, the hobbits would have been totally screwed and the whole thing would have turned into a huge fight between Sauron and Saruman.

But I digress.

The point being that while Tolkein cordially disliked allegory, I've gotten really, really sick of it, to thoroughly non-cordial levels. So I decided to complain about it here, because I haven't posted in a while. So this is the first in a two-part rant about irritatingly allegorical sci-fi movies I watched last year.

Last summer, I watched District 9, which was a decent enough action-thriller-thing; personally, I think its greatest strength is as a deconstruction of the reluctant hero archetype. What bugged me was that the only thing people seemed to mention about it was how it's an allegory about apartheid-era South Africa. Well, yeah, it is. And it's really, really obvious about it. And commentators all went on about this like it somehow made the movie deeper and more significant. Except that it didn't. If the film has any message to deliver, it's "Apartheid was bad!!1!!11!!!!1!" Um... can you tell us something we don't know? And why do you have to tell us this using pseudo-insectoid aliens?

If you really want to make a film demonstrating Man's Inhumanity To Man or whatever, then make one that shows us how something as terrible as apartheid can come to be in the first place. Show us how people can justify repressing millions of other people; get us to empathize with the people doing the repressing, put us at the top of the slippery slope. That would be interesting.

And if you want to make real science fiction, give us aliens that aren't human minds in CGI bug skins. The aliens of District 9 are barely alien at all; okay, so they don't entirely look like us, and their language is all clicks and whirrs, and they get high off of cat food, but that's all superficial. Once you get past the "ick-they're-giant-bug-shrimp-things" factor, they're just humans--psychologically, socially, every which way.

Of course, because District 9 is all allegorical, that's the point, right? To push through all that superficial stuff and get to the common ground, right? But wouldn't it be a lot more interesting to see humans reaching common ground with a really inhuman form of sentient life? What about a species modeled after eusocial colony insects that wasn't a lazy metaphor for totalitarianism or repressive social hierarchies? That would raise issues.

So I was bugged by District 9, and disappointed that lazy allegory still passes for significance. But, hey, it had some cool-enough action scenes in the usual '00s jittercam mockumentary mode, and it really does a good job turning the whole reluctant-hero thing on its head, so it wasn't all bad.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of this rant, wherein I shall complain a lot about James Cameron's little pet project, Avatar.