Incredibly overrated

Rating: 1/10 (17 August 2009)

I'm flabbergasted by the amount of positive feedback this film has received. It's more of a straight-up action movie than anything resembling science fiction, and while it has plenty of explosions and lots of splattering blood & guts, DISTRICT 9 is severely deficient in story, characters, ideas, and surprises.
In fact, you could argue that it doesn't have any characters at all, just a few types: the nerdy Accidental Protagonist, the Inscrutable Alien, the Executive Villain, the oddly unkillable Grunt Villain. Everybody else is just an intermittent talking head.
There's almost no story, and what plot developments do emerge are predictable way in advance.
Without giving too much away, I can say that the basic premise is a lot like that Outer Limits episode starring Robert Culp, with a slight twist. To that slender premise the script adds various clichés from recent SF films and series. But the movie never does what good SF does best: it never presents or explores big ideas, it never portrays alien worlds, and despite its CGI creatures, it never explores extraterrestrial psychology or culture.
DISTRICT 9 is also lacking in internal logic. As in the Star Wars series, aliens speak Alienese (with subtitles) and humans speak English, yet each species easily understands the other's language (even though the humans can't even read the subtitles!). Now I might buy into the notion that the aliens have special senses or faculties that enable them to understand English without speaking it, but I really can't believe that the humans somehow learned fluent Alienese without also learning SOMETHING about their biology, culture, technology, etc.
The aliens' physical appearance is strictly Motorized Action Figure. They are humanoid bipeds, yet they have bug-like or mollusc-like features. Somehow they are perfectly capable of breathing the Earth's atmosphere and eating terrestrial food. It's even suggested that they can have sex with humans.
Now when is the last time you had sex with an octopus or a cockroach, y'all?
At one point we are told that all the aliens we see are members of a worker caste, without any intelligence, yet we quickly learn that this isn't true. But if it isn't, why do the aliens usually behave as if they aren't sentient?
If I'm supposed to trust that the sequel clears all this up, well, you've already lost me. No way do I spend another dime on this franchise!
The film's portrayal of the aliens is somewhat less xenophobic than the handling of the bugs in STARSHIP TROOPERS or the scary creatures in INDEPENDENCE DAY, but its portrayal of black Africans seems downright racist. I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been any noise about that.
The movie that DISTRICT NINE most closely resembles is BLACKHAWK DOWN. If you loved that one, you might get a little out of this one. But even then, you'll find yourself wondering -- why don't the aliens just shoot down those darn helicopters? They get plenty of opportunities!
In a word: yuck.