Excellent premise but mixed execution

Rating: 6/10 (15 August 2009)

District 9 has a fresh science fiction premise: an alien mothership arrives to Earth and inertly levitates in the sky over Johannesburg, South Africa. Once humans find their way inside, they find a famished alien worker population. There is no value in them except for their advanced weaponry that is rendered inoperable to humans. Like any great science fiction story, there are plenty of things left as a mystery.
It is clear that Peter Jackson's role as a producer has benefited the film in many ways. There are excellent special effects and environments. The alien design is beautiful, although I'm sure that not everyone will agree with me. Their culture, language, and eating habits were reasonably believable. The attention to detail is fantastic, especially in implementing features such as the "For Humans Only" signs.
The beginning of the film takes advantage of a documentary style. The story is told through interviews and news footage to retell history as it happened. Soon afterwards, the film follows events through the perspective of Wikus van der Merwe, a field operative played by Sharlto Copley. Although he is one of the more sensitive humans around, he still suffers from arrogance and selfishness. In fact, one of the things that might have hurt the film is the lack of any admirable characters in the cast. I found the alien leader and his son to be the only respectable characters.
If the first half of District 9 is science fiction, the second half is action. Generally I enjoy action, but it was not very compelling here. I was disappointed to find that there was essentially no insight after the halfway mark. No plot surprises, no deep character interactions, and no creative uses of technology. The film simply deteriorated into unbelievable action and illogical consequences. The main characters dodge hundreds of bullets, blow up things (including lots of humans, which effectively burst in a spray of guts when hit by alien weapon projectiles), and manage to survive despite countless mistakes. The ending was strange, but does leave plenty of room open for a sequel (in 3 years?).
District 9 opened fine, but slowly lost its appeal for me as it progressed. It felt like the writers wanted to send a message, but then worried that the audience would lose their attention so they threw in lots of action to try to make an exciting finale. That might be fine for most people, but it diminished my appreciation for the interesting parts.