Great science fiction movies are like buses, it seems.  You wait years for one to arrive and then four come along all at once.  The classic period of moviemaking for science fiction - isolated pieces of genius like Kubrick’s 2001 and Charlton Heston’s iconic allegorical pot boiler Planet of the Apes aside - was 1977 to1994. This was the the period that gave us Star Wars, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Alien and Aliens, The Abyss and the first two Terminator movies. It was the period that saw science fiction move from B-movie status to mainstream to the main money making staple of Hollywood. By comparison, the next fifteen years were relatively fallow, unless you count Peter Jackson’s magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy as science fiction, which you shouldn’t, because it isn’t. Solaris and Sunshine were decent films, and Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Minority Report and War of the Worlds all came close to greatness, but that was about it. Sure, there was lots of superhero guff of varying quality – but again that’s a different genre with its own rules and regulations. Science Fiction, at its best, uses plausible science in a different future or alternate universe that can reflect back something of ourselves, culturally, philosophically or politically.

2009 by comparison saw a rich vein of SF material hit our local multiplexes. Duncan Jones’s low budget, but complex and critically acclaimed psychological thriller Moon made a big impression, and JJ Abram’s re-imagining of Star Trek as big budget action spectacular was memorably entertaining, if lacking the big ideas and philosophical depth that made the best of the original Star Trek episodes what they were. Two films in particular, however, have become instant ‘classics’ for real fans of the genre – Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and James Cameron’s long awaited 3D ‘game changer’, Avatar.

Peter Jackson protégé Blomkamp’s film, set in an alternative but recognisable post-apartheid South Africa, cost a ‘mere’ 30 million dollars to make, but grossed seven times that at the box office during the summer. Released on DVD in the week that Avatar hit the big screen, District 9 went straight to number one in the DVD sales chart.  Made with the same ‘outside Hollywood’ sensibility that was behind Lord of the Rings, this thrilling, visceral film is that rare film event; the cinematically literate but nevertheless pulse pounding action movie, with something important to say about how we see and treat the ‘other’ in society.

Shot with grit and realism in a partly documentary style, this unique and original film follows the story of company bureaucrat and somewhat shallow everyman, Wikus Van De Merwe, and a closer than intended encounter with refugee aliens held in a slum internment camp on the outside of Johannesburg – the eponymous District 9.

The back story, skilfully and quickly told thanks to the corporate documentary device that opens the film, is that 20 or so years ago a giant spaceship arrives, hovering over Johannesburg.  (Yes - at last, Aliens arrive on planet earth and don’t go to America!)

Entry is gained to the alien ship, but to their surprise searchers find a massive disorientated, disorganised and starving alien population, seemingly unable to access or control the fantastic technology all around them.  Cut to the present day, and the alien refugees are third class citizens, derogatorily referred to as ‘prawns’, kept in appalling conditions in District 9, and treated with suspicion and hatred by the indigenous human population, black and white.

Van de Merwe, played brilliantly by first time actor, Sharlto Copley, leads an armed eviction operation into District 9 to ‘persuade’ them to relocate to a shiny new District 10 far away from the human populace. The not-so-hidden agenda of the private security corporation Van de Merwe works for however, is to find a way to get the alien technology – in particular the aliens weaponry to work, and thus make a killing in the international arms market. During the operation, Van de Merwe is infected with a hidden alien liquid. Soon he begins to change – and in more ways than one.

The parallels with apartheid, with the gulag, with Gaza, with the nazi concentration camps, and the dehumanising treatment meted out to asylum seekers and desperate economic migrants in countries all over the world are plain to see, but it is the performance of Copley as Van de Merwe that is at the heart of this film. Encouraged to improvise his own dialogue a la Mike Leigh by director Blomkamp, the result is a genuinely affecting emotional journey. We begin by hating this officious bureaucrat and his appalling callousness towards the aliens, then, as he changes and his perspective changes, we wind up rooting for him and the aliens in their common struggle for humanity and decency in the face of heartless corporate militarism.

The same heartless corporate militarism is the enemy in James Cameron’s long awaited return to the epic SF genre in Avatar.    

Set in the middle of the 22^nd century, the action takes place on Pandora, an inhabited moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic solider who ‘could’ve been fixed, but not in this economy’, joins the Avatar scientific research program lead by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). Pandora has a rich flora and fauna, but its atmosphere is poisonous to humans. Augustine’s program downloads human minds into cloned bodies of the Na’vi, Pandora’s nine foot high, blue skinned indigenous inhabitants to interact with them and to learn more about their native society and Pandoran life.

The Company and its military backers who fund the project have other ideas, however. Their principle interest in Pandora is neither scientific or cultural, but the huge profits to be made from the rare mineral ‘unobtainium’ under the planet’s soil.

Jake is told by the military commander of the Pandoran base to provide the necessary intelligence to help them move the na’vi from their giant ‘hometree’. If he does, treatment to ‘neuroregenerate’ his legs will be paid for.

Jake initially carries out his orders, but as he comes to know the na’vi and their world, to fall in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a na’vi female hunter and warrior, and as the ever more brutal methods of the militarist corporation that wants to exploit Pandora are exposed, Jake defects to join the na’vi in their struggle against the human invaders.

The expectations heaped upon Cameron’s movie were huge. Not only was this the first movie from the writer/director of Terminator, Aliens and Titanic in ten years, this was being hyped as a movie that would change cinema going forever with a revolutionary three-d technique developed by Cameron himself, not used to substitute for storytelling by shock effect but to draw the viewer into the narrative and an utterly unique new world. Does it deliver? Absolutely.

Think Dances with Wolves meets The Emerald Forest meets Aliens meets David Attenborough’s Life meets Apocalypse Now – in 3D. This is gloriously entertaining, thrilling and emotionally engaging blockbuster film making - with purpose. Its anti-corporatist, pro-environment message may not be subtle, but this is not film making for a narrow elite. Cameron has acknowledged that the movie is a direct criticism of the Iraq war and the destruction of the human environment in the name of profit. Yet its messages are also broader than that. Although posed in a mystical, mythical language, the Na’vi’s links with their world are real and scientific within the context of the world his film creates. Cameron is telling us we do not have to abandon scientific rationalism and curiousity to embrace our environment, our common humanity, and leave the naked drive for profit behind.

Ultimately, this is the story of a battered and traumatised soldier that ‘through an emotional journey of redemption and revolution’ as Cameron says in one of the movie’s early press trails, comes to realise that it is his own government, his own army, that are the enemy.

I want to say a word about the two final scenes in both these films – films you should see if you haven’t already done so, and even if, perhaps, you’re more normally Socialist Realist than Science Fiction.

At the very end of District 9 we see Wikus as a lone, hunted being, but also a transformed and redeemed one. Having physically changed into that which, in his own society, is ‘other’, he sits alone in a wasteland, cradling a copy of a metal sculpted rose he has delivered, without showing himself, to his still human wife. Like the film itself, the final frame asks most profound question – what does it mean to be ‘human’?  And is that even the right word anymore?

The final frames of Avatar, as Jake Sully undergoes his final transformation, are no less powerful, and the message no less clear. You too have the power to change.

You too can open your eyes, and fight for a better world.