There were three really significant science fiction movies in 2009, and they have received critical acclaim and awards attention in roughly inverse proportion to how much they deserve them.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

First I should explain which movies are not among these three. Superhero films are not really science fiction, so that excludes Watchmen and arguably Push. Star Trek was a sequel and a remake, and while an extremely successful one, didn’t really break new ground in any particular direction. Terminator Salvation was a mess. The Time Traveler’s Wife was a romance novel.  The Road was a Cormac McCarthy novel. 9 barely had a story. Monsters vs. Aliens and Astroboy were cartoons. 2012 and Transformers were beneath contempt.

No, the significant science fiction films from 2009 were, in alphabetical order, Avatar, District 9, and Moon.

Avatar was nominated for nine Oscars, District 9 for four, and Moon for none.

We discussed Avatar on SPJ before, but of all of us I was by far the most critical, saying (in the comments):

Avatar is a failure as a film. My hope is that history will eventually come to regard it in a similar light as Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will; both of those films were technical masterpieces that significantly advanced the state of the cinematic art, and both of them were morally bankrupt products of their time.

This sounds hyperbolic, and I am only too aware how precariously close to invoking Godwin’s Law I am by making this pronouncement, but Avatar is a dangerous film. Its technical achievements work in service of a story that is both hamfistedly unsubtle and socially naive; it packages its simplistic environmental message in a tale that embraces so many noble savage fallacies it’s hard to keep track of them.

Even if one is willing to set aside the social and racial issues of Avatar, it is also a disappointment as a work of speculative fiction. It presents the viewers with a number of fascinating ideas, then fails to explore the consequences of a single one of them. The Na’vi are set up to be a startlingly different culture from ours, with a deity whose existence is measurable, empirical fact, and a connection to their environment that has a literal, physical manifestation. Yet they fight with insulting, inexplicable naiveté, and die when the plot requires them to. Avatar deserves an Oscar nod for visual effects, but that is where its successes begin and end.

District 9 is a more complicated case. I applaud its ambition and parts of its execution; as a parable of racism and apartheid it embodies the nobler of science fiction’s virtues, but good intentions are not enough. Execution is paramount.

The villains in District 9 have a single motivation: the acquisition and control of alien weaponry. One group of villains goes about this in a methodical, scientific way. The other group is a barbarous tribe who inexplicably believes that slaughtering and devouring aliens will bestow alien abilities on them. I will let the reader guess the races of each group. The aliens themselves, stand-ins for repressed ethnicities anywhere in the world, seem to be the filthy, barely-intelligent creatures most humans dismiss them as; only one out of many thousands of them has any agency or intellect. We’re given no explanation for this, leaving us to wonder how else humanity could or should treat a population of semisentient aliens who seem unable to take care of themselves. This film has a message, but it’s not the message it thinks it has.

I appreciated District 9‘s intentions, and its visual storytelling is beyond criticism. Neill Blomkamp is clearly a promising director, and I look forward to his subsequent efforts. It takes risks in an era when science fiction films are increasingly disinclined to do so. With ten slots in the offing, I don’t think a Best Picture nomination is unreasonable—but it should by no means win.

Which leaves us with Moon—brilliant, underappreciated Moon.

Made for less than it cost to create three minutes of Avatar, Moon was the best science fiction film of the year, and arguably the best picture of any kind. Director Duncan Jones stretched his five million dollar budget within an inch of its life to create a compelling, intimate portrait of the day-to-day life of the solitary supervisor of a lunar mining operation.

Moon is more than atmosphere, though. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I must assume that Jones has seen and read enough science fiction to know what viewers would be expecting from a story like his. Gloriously, he defies those expectations. Where we expect the film to descend into weary, taut-psychological-thriller territory, it instead embraces a more optimistic view of humanity. When we expect it to make a statement about the untrustworthiness of technology, it shows us cooperation. And when we expect it to end one way, it ends another. As a fan of science fiction, I’ve become accustomed to films that bludgeon me over the head with their effects and their messages; subtlety is a rare thing in modern filmmaking in general, and rarer still in genre film. Yet Moon respects both its audience and its own characters enough to paint a nuanced and affecting portrait.

Its success in doing so hinges in no small part upon Sam Rockwell’s performance, and he delivers. His lack of a nod from the Academy is the most egregious aspect of the film’s total Oscar snub; the exclusion of Clint Mansell’s evocative score and Jones’s heroic direction follow closely behind.

It is tempting, in the end, to make sweeping predictions about society’s preference for empty entertainment and Hollywood’s willingness to cater to that preference, but I don’t think it’s so simple. Had Moon been marketed outside of art-house theaters, I have no doubt it would have made more money and commanded more industry attention. Had Blomkamp run his script by a couple more people, District 9 could have been the film it wanted to be.

I even think there’s hope for Cameron. Yes, buried somewhere in the guts of Avatar, there was a great film trying to get out.

In the end, it won’t matter. Years from now, we’ll shake our head at which films got which awards, wondering how, with no less than ten Best Picture nominations to award, the academy saw fit to ignore the achievements of some of its peers’ finest efforts, but it won’t matter. Quality endures.