The thinking man’s alien movie

Likely the most original film I’ve seen all year; tremendously rich premise and insightful commentary. Still the requisite blood and guts for an alien/monster summer flick, but I could have watched 2 hours of just the social commentary, presented in a mix of faux news footage and documentary-style camera shots. And like the best speculative fiction, it leads you to reflect on our real world relationships and actions.

The film’s website is similarly innovative, presented as an artifact of the situation, with more man-on-the-street interviews.

If you can handle the monsters and gross special effects, this one is highly recommended.

Update: Oh wow, for the original short District 9 was based on, they actually asked people about the Zimbabwean immigrant problems South Africa was experiencing. Art imitating life…

How is America going to end? – fascinating report on what people think will happen to the U.S., based on a future scenarios game and broken down by demographics.

Our biases about the future

This post by Robin Hanson strikes me as a gold mine of opportunities for concept design:

We seem primed to confidently see history as an inevitable march toward a theory-predicted global conflict with an alien united them determined to oppose our core symbolic values, making infeasible overly-risky overconfident plans to oppose them.  We seem primed to neglect the value and prospect of trillions of quirky future creatures not fundamentally that different from us, focused on their simple day-to-day pleasures, mostly getting along peacefully in vastly-varied uncoordinated and hard-to-predict local cultures and life-styles.