Not fun, not exciting, and very depressing

Rating: 2/10 (18 August 2009)

Is this what sci-fi has come to? Does something have to be clichéd, depressing and boring in order to count as excellent sci-fi among the so-called professional movie critics?! District 9 is basically a mish mash of concepts from earlier sci-fi films like Alien Nation, Aliens, Iron Man, and perhaps one or two ideas from the Halo video games thrown in to create something that is far less than spectacular.
Some of the ideas are good, but the movie is more an exercise in sadism than it is in entertainment. Aliens are persecuted, brutally murdered, people suffer, and basically there is nothing really to enjoy in this movie except maybe the occasional humorous subtitle from the Aliens. The whole film is about racism on the alien level.
I don't know exactly how anybody in their right mind could call a movie that is completely about either killing or persecution a great film. The greatest films IMHO can be viewed by anyone, not just the male demographic aged 18 to 40. If you were to ask me if I liked anything about this movie, I would say that ironically I really liked the very last scene. Until that last scene the movie was totally and needlessly barbaric and sickeningly intolerable in its xenophobic attitudes.
This is not as good as the critics would have you believe, and this movie is certainly not for everybody, and I find the high score on both rottentomatoes and the IMDb here to be totally unwarranted. If that isn't satisfactory, then by all means go see it for yourself and see what I'm talking about.