I may not be the best judge of this film

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2011)

District 9 is a brutal and uncompromising film with a wonderful concept and real visual flair. It's also not nearly as smart or bold as people say.
I should preface this review by acknowledging that my opinion of this movie may be colored by the fact that it made me physically ill. It's yet another pseudo-documentary shot in the style of hand held video, so the camera is constantly swerving and jerking and shaking about. Before it was halfway over, my motion sickness kicked in and I spent the rest of the film with a headache and an upset stomach. If you were bothered by The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, you'll be bothered by District 9.
And besides making me ill, the camera work is also the single biggest problem with this movie. Parts of the film are clearly supposed to be "real" footage shot by a "real" cameraman, yet there are other parts of the film where no camera or cameraman existsand it looks exactly the same as the pseudo-documentary footage. It completely destroys the illusion of verisimilitude that's the whole point of using the pseudo-documentary approach. Because the "real" footage and the stuff the audience sees as omniscient observers looks exactly the same, it only emphasizes how artificial everything is.
The story is about aliens forced to live in a segregated slum when their spaceship basically parks itself above Johannesberg, South Africa. The aliens, called "prawns", live in an apartheid state of oppression and abuse. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is a nebbishy middle-manager for the agency in charge of the "prawns" who, because he's married to the boss' daughter, is assigned to lead the effort to move the aliens to new and even harsher living arrangements. Then something happens to Van De Merwe that makes him appreciate the horrible things being done to the aliens and he resolves to do what he can to help them escape.
This is an excellently made film from most of the technical perspectives. The special effects are amazing and innovative. The story is reasonably well thought out. Sharlto Copley does a very good job portraying Van De Merwe as a realistically non-heroic character. There are a bunch of really interesting ideas alluded to throughout the script.
It's hard to get emotionally involved in the movie, however. Besides the artifice of the pseudo-documentary style, the only significant human character in the story is Van De Merwe, and he's so unlikeable and unsympathetic that it's hard to care what happens to him. When the most appealing person in a film is a computer generated, 7 foot tall, repulsive insectthat's kind of a problem. District 9 also never does more than allude to interesting ideas. It doesn't do anything more with the "aliens living in South African apartheid" concept than the James Cann/Mandy Patinkin buddy movie Alien Nation did with the "extraterrestrial immigrants trying to assimilate in America" concept. And there's nothing in this movie about aliens being mistreated by humans that we haven't already seen in at least 7 Star Trek, 37 X-Files and 43 Stargate episodes.
I fear I'm being too negative about District 9 because it made me want to throw up. It's a graphically violent and somewhat simplistic morality tale that's a bit like the Star Trek remake. It has flaws, but overcomes them to be fairly enjoyable. As long as it doesn't make you puke.