Why was District 9 alien ship stuck for so long?
The alien ship appears to be stranded and inoperable for the 20 years it hangs over Johannesburg. Early on we are shown that a small vessel had detached from the ship and disappeared.
Approaching the movie's climax we learn:
1. The small vessel was hidden under a shack in District 9 the entire time.
2. The vessel is a command module that can activate the alien technology and the stranded ship itself.
3. Alien Christopher Johnson (and cohorts) spent 20 years collecting enough "fluid" from alien scrap metal to power up the command module ... and (he suggests) to subsequently get the entire ship very quickly to retrieve alien help.
All of the "fluid" needed to power the ship to leave Earth came with the ship itself. In fact, enough could be extracted just from the small pieces of debris that fell off of the ship onto the ground while it was stranded.
Even if we accept that the ship lost or ran out of the distilled fluid fuel, is there a good explanation for why Christopher Johnson didn't stay on the ship and extract it there directly, rather than going to the ground to scavenge it from scraps and distill it in a shack over the course of 20 years?
Best Answer
As mentioned by Morbo in the comments, the ship stopped due to a leadership crisis, as prawns work as a hive mind and left with no leader.
Even the director explained the same thing, from io9
The hive mind [concept] is the most important thing to me, because I love the idea of a civilization that can build all of that technology and then, at the same time, just have a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own. I found that to be a really interesting concept. Also, it sort of explains why they don't turn on the humans. Individually, they may be feeling oppressed, but they don't have it together enough to form a resistance and back one another. So I found that really interesting.
The other thing is that the ship was meant to clip together with other ships. So there's, like, vast amounts of resources that they're bringing to the parent planet. And the ship, when the army generals or the queen of that particular ship died off by some sort of virus or bacteria that they picked up on some other planet, that killed them off. And it didn't effect these sort of resilient, hardy sort of drone workers. Then the technology is usually the thing that they relied on to save them, but in this case it sort of screwed them because it brought them to a planet that kind of treated them pretty badly, but it was the ship that realized that, unless it gets to a life sustaining planet everything is going to die, which is a cool idea. So the ship just auto pilots to the closest one in the Goldilocks band, and it's our planet and then pulls up and hits the breaks.
Pictures about "Why was District 9 alien ship stuck for so long?"
How did Wikus get infected in District 9?
Sharlto Copley as Wikus van de Merwe, a mild-mannered, bumbling, awkward bureaucrat at the MNU Department of Alien Affairs, who becomes infected with an alien fluid, slowly turning him into one of the "prawns". This was the first time acting professionally in a feature film for Copley, a friend of director Blomkamp.Is District 9 a true life story?
Many viewers will be surprised to know that the 2009 sci-fi hit District 9 is actually based on real events. The movie is a mock documentary following the relocation process of a group of aliens who have been stranded in Johannesburg, South Africa, and are living in a refugee camp.What happened to Wikus in District 9?
The final shot of the film shows that Wikus has fully transformed into an alien and leaves anonymous gifts at his wife's door to show he's still thinking of her. Audiences might eventually learn more about Wikus, as director Neill Blomkamp has said he'd like to finish the Wikus/Christopher story.What do the aliens represent in District 9?
The aliens are refugees. 'Prawns' is the nickname given to them because of their physical resemblance to giant two-legged shrimp. They're set up in a make-shift ghetto called District 9.DISTRICT 9 PRAWNS - Explained
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Images: Kelly L, Charles Parker, Enric Cruz López, Ryutaro Tsukata