Daily Dialogue — July 11, 2016

WIKUS: We are here at, uh…must I look…
REPORTER: Just look straight at the lens, here.
WIKUS: We are here at, uh, MNU head office, Department of Alien Affairs. My name is Wikus van de Merwe, and behind me you can see other Alien Affairs workers. And what we do here at this department is we try to engage with the Prawn on behalf of MNU and on behalf of humans.
BRADNAM: Not everyone was surprised that the ship didn’t come to a stop over Manhattan, Washington or Chicago, but, instead, coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg. The doors didn’t open for three months. It just hovered there. Nobody could get in. And they eventually decided, after much deliberation, that the best thing to do would be to physically cut their way in.
LIVINGSTONE: We were on the verge of first contact. The whole world was watching, expecting, I don’t know, music from heaven and bright shining lights.
BRADNAM: The creatures were extremely malnourished. Um, they were very unhealthy. They seemed to be aimless. There was a lot of international pressure on us at the time. The entire world was looking at Johannesburg, so we had to do the right thing. The government then established an aid group that starts to ferry the aliens to a temporary camp that we set up just beneath the ship.
LIVINGSTONE: We didn’t have a plan. There was a million. So, what was a temporary holding zone soon became fenced, became militarized, and before we knew it, it was a slum.
MORANEAU: Well, the truth is, nobody really knew what this place was. There’s a lot of secrets in District 9.
MCKENZIE: At first, a lot of attention was given to, uh, giving the aliens proper status and protection.
WOMAN: They’re spending so much money to keep them here when they could be spending it on other things, but there’s at least…at least they’re keeping them separate from us.
MICHAELS: I want to be realistic with everyone. The aliens will not be able to go home.
TV HOST: The aliens are here to stay.

— District 9 (2009), written by Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Info Dump suggested by Will King who also is responsible for today’s post.

Trivia: Around six different endings were created during filming.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “Speculative fiction and fantasy have some of the hardest work to do and often have to rely on exposition to give the audience an understanding of the story situation. District 9 takes place on a contemporary earth but in an alternate reality where aliens arrive and are partially integrated into human society. The writers took the imaginative approach to give the audience the needed background through a mock documentary that shows how the story situation came to be before the main plot gets rolling.”