Quote:
Originally Posted by RW99
Just saw it this afternoon, great movie. A couple of questions though:
Why set up a zone for a million aliens in the middle of a city?
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I think most if not all of the living conditions for the aliens were setup to mirror apartheid. Aslo I think they just acted without foresight probably thinking the district would be temporary, but it turned into 20 years.
From Wikipedia--
As one of the oldest black settlements in Johannesburg, Sophiatown held an almost symbolic importance for the 50,000 blacks it contained, both in terms of its sheer vibrancy and its unique culture. Despite a vigorous ANC protest campaign and worldwide publicity, the removal of Sophiatown began on 9 February 1955 under the Western Areas Removal Scheme. In the early hours, heavily armed police entered Sophiatown to force residents out of their homes and load their belongings onto government trucks. The residents were taken to a large tract of land, thirteen miles (19 km) from the city centre, known as Meadowlands (that the government had purchased in 1953). Meadowlands became part of a new planned black city called Soweto. The Sophiatown slum was destroyed by bulldozers, and a new white suburb named Triomf (Triumph) was built in its place. This pattern of forced removal and destruction was to repeat itself over the next few years, and was not limited to people of African descent. Forced removals from areas like Cato Manor (Mkhumbane) in Durban, and District Six in Cape Town, where 55,000 coloured and Indian people were forced to move to new townships on the Cape Flats, were carried out under the Group Areas Act of 1950. Ultimately, nearly 600,000 coloured, Indian and Chinese people were moved in terms of the Group Areas Act
I liked the moral ambiguity of the Wickers character. He committed heinous acts without remorse, like the killing of the prawn eggs, but he was still a committed and loving husband, and cringed at the thought of killing an adult prawn. He was presented as neither good nor evil, but just a man. Flawed, and realistic.
Really, the only noble characters in the entire film were Christopher and his son. Prawns that were supposed to be less than dirt.
Open endings bug me to no end, but it was pretty fitting in this case as there really were no winners in the meeting of the species, and it'd be a shame to have one side triumph.