Sadly, Does Not Live Up to the Hype

Rating: 5/10 (4 September 2009)

Here Be SPOILERS!!!!
Proceed with caution!
There's a lot to love about District 9. And all of it is tech. It is beautifully and realistically shot on steadicam and hand-held cameras. It has the grainy look and "just-this-very-second-edited" feel of a documentary. It shouts this is real...this happened. The weapons are awesome. The aliens are cool and odd and ALIEN and REAL. Kudos to the CGI guys! Let's take a look at the rest. We were lead to believe that the story was original. Original storyumNOT! Been thereDone that. Alien NationHello?? Alien Nation tackled the 'stranded alien' story 20 years ago and did it better. Other TV shows have tackled it. The ONLY original part at all was the ship hovering over South Africa. We already know the movie is a thinly veiled commentary on the South African history of Apartheid. It is supposedly a socially conscious movie that doesn't bang you over the head (too much) with preachiness. Instead it gives us a doltish ordinary bloke named Wikus who has been promoted into a job that everyone but him realizes he is ill suited to execute. He's a pencil pushing weasel elevated to supervisor and has no idea what to do.
Wikus is embarrassingly prejudiced and blithely racist. You can almost hear his friends making excuses for him. 'He doesn't mean any harm, you see. It's just the way he is.' It is the everyday ordinariness of his prejudice that is so frightening. It is so alarmingly close to the way we all are that it is difficult to watch. His condescending superiority in the face of his ignorance cuts to the bone. We are, all of us, guilty. How can any of us judge? Is this one side of this coin? This Everyman allows us to see the alien residing within us. That is the true horror.
Part of what befalls the main character is engineered by his employer and father-in-law. Part of what happens is because the main character is an idiot. Again, everyone is aware of this but him. When he begins to transform into what he despises he finally begins to get a clue...but it is too little, almost too late. After he bonks the good alien on the head, hijacks his ship and kidnaps his son. Wikus wants it all to go back to the way it was BEFORE. But it's much too late for that. I won't go into the enormous plot holes because others on here have kicked that horse.
I don't get the comparisons to Blade Runner or Matrix. I justdon't. This movie is not that important. Blomkamp shows promise but he's not Ridley Scott and he's not Wachowski material either.
My one serious downer is the excessive 'squishiness'. There is waaaay too much body fluid tossed about. Humans get squished. Aliens get squashed. The movie is awash in yuck and gore. I don't do yuck and gore so I was a bit taken aback.
DO. NOT. GO. SEE. THIS. MOVIE. You'll be disappointed and upset that the hype sucked you in. Prove P.T. Barnum wrongalthough I didn't.