Surprisingly overrated

Rating: 1/10 (9 January 2010)

District 9 is a buddy movie about a human and a space alien. The human has prejudices against space aliens, which he has to overcome, and then they become best of friends. The human is a hysterical egocentric asshole in most of the movie. This makes it a bit hard to relate to him. The space alien, on the other hand, has no personality whatsoever.
The action? There is a lot of high-tech weapons. And people are shooting at each other. I find it boring, but some might like it. Some reviewers has criticized the movie for having too much gore. Which should be a good thing, right? I truly love gore, but the CGI blood in this movie is so uninspired that it hurts. Toribash clips on youtube have higher production value.
I don't mind that a story is predictable and linear. Tim Burtons movies are great, despite their uninspired story lines. However, District 9 has nothing to distract your attention from the lack of story.
So, this is a scifi-action-gore-buddy-movie, with main characters you don't care about, a stupid story line and boring action sequences.
Is that it?
No. They also tries to do social commentary! Not that there's anything wrong with movies about serious subjects. But when I want to deal with heavy stuff like apartheid or refugee camps, I don't want it to be in a cheap action flick.
At one point, the wife of the protagonist accuse him of having had sexual relations with a space alien! He denies it, arguing that they are far too disgusting for that.
One would assume that the space aliens would feel the same way about humans: That the humans would be too far from the space alien norm to be a likely lay. Not so. The space aliens are doing the nasty with human prostitutes. No, there's no footage. It sounds quite much like "Black Men are after our Women 2.0"
This would be cool in a Troma movie. But not in a movie that aims for social commentary.
Now to the positive side:
1) I love 'body horror' transformations. 2) The movie has lots of plot holes, and counting them would make watching it slightly interesting. 3) The space aliens are addicted to cat food!