Disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2009)

I had high expectations for this movie, and I've been looking forward to it for a long time, but I was a little disappointed once the credits started to roll.
I'm glad to see that a movie like this even got made with a decent budget, a wide release, and good marketing. I'm thrilled that it came in first place at the box office on its opening weekend and is getting good press. Having grown up in the 90s, I miss the former place of prominence aliens had in the popular culture. Hopefully the financial success of this movie will encourage the studios to green light more films in the same genre.
Overall, District 9 is creative and entertaining, but not as original or intelligent as I'd hoped. The trailers seemed to promise the film's main storyline would explore the societal impact of the aliens' arrival and the rich history that preceded the film's main action.
But the story that emerges from its great premise is pretty standard. It hardly develops the aliens' history or psychology. What little development we do get is uninspired, incomplete, and self-contradictory. It also doesn't explore the cultural impact of their arrival with the kind of depth that I'd hoped it would.
And none of the characters are particularly well-developed. Read a synopsis of the movie, and you'll have about as deep of an understanding of the main characters as you would if you'd have watched the whole film. Aside from a unique name and a slightly amusing quirkiness, the main character is relatively forgettable.
My other main criticism is that the narrative isn't as cohesive as I would've preferred. The story jumps from one scene to the next with little or no effort to establish the setting or the purpose of the action. It all ends up feeling less deliberate and focused than it ought to, and I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something essential missing from the mix. The faux-documentary style seemed arbitrary and without a clear purpose. I wanted to be able to forget that this was the director's feature film debut, but this thought kept popping into my head again and again.
District 9 does have a great premise, and its presentation is pretty solid. The first few minutes of the film do an excellent job of making this fictional world feel believable and realistic. But since the filmmakers did an excellent job in some departments, it makes the film's shortcomings in certain crucial areas that much harder to forgive.
Overall, it's a worthwhile use of two hours' time and the price of admission, and it's certainly more deserving of success than most other films currently in theaters. However, it's not the intelligent, insightful, engaging, allegorical story I'd hoped it would be. Instead, it comes off as an ambitious misfire: an entertaining-but-simple story with a handful of interesting ideas.
Hopefully, though, District 9's critical and commercial success will help pave the way for a resurgence of well-funded, high-concept sci-fi films (especially alien invasion ones).