Clever Viral Marketing Aside, The Film Isn't Very Good

Rating: 4/10 (16 August 2009)

I am tired of hearing about the clever marketing campaign, and how cool the preview showings were.
Objectively, this movie was not very good.
The first half of the movie is a political allegory, and the second half of the movie is an action movie. The whole movie is told with a hand-held camera in a documentary style, that works for a while, and then gets annoying.
The character development is awful, and Wikus Van De Merwe played by Sharlto Copley, is creepy and unlikeable. Copley is competent enough, but he is played as simply nerdy and the performance did not have enough depth. The only alien with a personality was the baby alien. The rest are just targets for abuse.
On the bright side, the art direction was solid, and the initial premise of the story is interesting. I don't know how they animated the aliens, but that seemed realistic throughout. They were pretty ugly, and they spent a lot of time wiggling their facial appendages at the camera.
This is a Sci-Fi, and it does not need to make sense, but this movie makes less sense then most. There are too many plot twists that have no purpose except to advance the story.
There is a tradition of Sci-Fi that is darker and scarier than recent Sci-Fi films. This film is trying to channel that tradition, and maybe it succeeds in bringing Sci-Fi back to its roots -- on the other hand, better dialog, more character development, and more attention to the plot would have helped.
I ordinarily give a extra points for taking on a tough political or moral issue, but this was a heavy-handed morality play. The messages of this movie -- something like, "People are terrible," and "Be nice or the aliens will get revenge," -- do not seem worth the effort.