Defend And Insult Continued

I really did not expect to be making a follow-up to my last post. I thought it was going to stand on its own and maybe some day in the future I might revisit it. But my experiences today sort of demanded it.

I have recently become a huge fan of The Spoony Experiment, the website of Noah Antwiler (the spoony one), who does reviews of movies, video games, and roleplaying games. I'm going through a lot of his archives, and I just so happened to see that he had a review of District 9.

Yesterday, I really hesitated before saying that I believe perfect stories exist. In my mind, I only hold two stories in that high regard: Portal 2, and District 9. I hesitated because I was unsure if I could honestly say they are perfect. I don't know of a single story that doesn't have criticisms to it. And can a story be perfect if it is criticized?

Ultimately, I decided that these stories deserved the title. I believe that a story can be perfect without being beloved by 100% of people. If I don't like romance stories in principle, then it is impossible to make a romance story that I will like, but it is possible to make a flawless story in the genre. As such, I believed that for what they were, Portal 2 and District 9 are perfect, so I went ahead and made the claim that I believe perfect stories exist.

So when I saw that Spoony had reviewed District 9, I had to watch it. I set up the video, sit back, and hear a strange tone in his voice. He enjoyed the movie and he thought it was a good movie, but was disappointed in it. He did praise the many excellent qualities of the movie, including the special effects, and the high quality writing, but also found faults in them.

While the special effects are fantastic, there was a criticism of the style they were used in. For example, the movie starts out as a documentary, then switches over into a more standard action movie filming, and Spoony said that it was jarring to switch from one to the other. He would have preferred it be all one or all the other.

Another criticism was that, although the movie is a flawless analogy of apartheid, somehow none of the characters realize that this is a flawless analogy of apartheid.

I loved District 9. I was kind of shocked that anybody, let alone somebody I really respect, would have any negative words to say about it. But as I sat there listening, I really checked my memory. And yeah, I do remember it being kind weird, a little jarring, switching from "footage" to just being regular movie shooting. And yeah, it is kind of weird that South Africans are somehow all cool with each other racially, yet also maintain extreme prejudice against a bunch of fairly harmless aliens.

I can't ignore these things, but I can still love District 9. I can still claim it's perfect (though that would require some more defending now). However, I can't say it's above or beyond criticism. It isn't. Nothing is.

I am still a die-hard fan of District 9, and that is precisely why I must both defend and insult it. It shows that I don't have fanboy blinders on. It shows that I am being as honest about what it is as I can be, and that I understand it may not be everybody's cup of tea, but that if you like the things it has to offer, you will love it.