Too much handwavium.

Rating: 6/10 (15 August 2009)

This one's sin lies in being unable to decide whether it's a summer blockbuster or a 'serious' mockumentary lecture on the terrors of apartheid. Fully committing to this sin, "District 9" did neither well.
It's 'action' part lacks both suspense and logic with the human protagonist instantly switching between a weeping mess and a cold-blooded killer whenever the plot calls for some big explosions.
The 'mocumentary' part fails miserably due to actually telling us nothing about the global events - why exactly the aliens have spent twenty-something years in those ghettos simply multiplying, why there is no productive contact between them and humans whatsoever except for the trading weapons for cat food part, which in itself is quite strange as we do not see the aliens producing anything to pay for the cat food, much less somehow producing enough weapons to last them for decades (and we're specifically told that the aliens were evacuated from the ship, thus the weapons?..), what exactly changed over those years that allowed the sweet sympathetic ET-lookalike (totally your multicultural neighbor, mon) alien to just start up the ship and leave and so on.
Oh, and this would've worked way, way better without the whole political correctness part subtly shoved down the watcher's brain with a jackhammer.