For long stretches of filming, every hour is an off-hour. Denied anything to watch or click or scroll or read, contestants kill time in the Bachelor mansion with what remains to them: eating, drinking, and saying more than they mean to. In contrast with this surfeit of leisure time, minutes spent in the direct presence of the show’s lead are scarce. Referred to as “one-on-one time”—sometimes even shortened to just “time” because everyone knows what kind matters—contestants arrive on set hungry for it and stay never quite sated. It’s the one resource every contestant, no matter what other advantages they might possess, needs in order to conceive and develop romance. As one contestant puts it: “Time is the most important thing in this entire process. You don’t get time—you’re going home. Because how is any relationship going to form if you don’t have time?”

Excerpted from Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor © SUZANNAH SHOWLER, 2018. Published by ECW Press, ecwpress.com.

There are two significant things to note about District 9. First, the hypermodern you-are-there visual style, clearly influenced by CNN, reality TV, embedded reporting, and the other techniques that have characterized the “War on Terror” aesthetic. This same kind of shaky camera work, complete with documentary-style zoom lenses, harsh lighting, and choppy focus-pulling, was the hallmark of another recent grim science-fiction series and clear 9/11 fable, Battlestar Galactica.

The second and more important thing about this movie is its setting and context, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The director, Neill Blomkamp, has adapted this feature from a short film he made, Alive in Joburg, about alien refugees living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps and shantytowns around South Africa’s largest city. The racial overtones at work here are pretty obvious (science fiction has been making hay out of racial metaphors since the beginning) but the specific location here—post-apartheid South Africa; a continent struggling to cope with massive flows of migrants, within and across borders; booming exurban slums—is particularly contemporary. (Klaatu and Gort clambering out of their spaceship onto the White House lawn this ain’t.) In the original short film, there’s an explicit political connection to the apartheid government and the racial divides that defined the country for decades. Can that message survive the transition to a mainstream feature co-financed by Sony/Tristar? Even if the overt political message is diluted, there’s still an implicit one in setting this story in Johannesburg, away from obvious trappings of Western political, economic, cultural and military domination. In a culture where non-westerners are usually depicted as either helpless, expendable, irrelevant, villainous, or hopelessly sentimentalized, this flips the perspective and makes them the centre of the action. That’s not an insignificant achievement for a big Hollywood science-fiction movie.