Mindlessly violent Rorsach inkblot of a film

Rating: 3/10 (8 January 2012)

District 9: Very strange and brutally violent sci-fi set in Johannesburg, featuring vogue-y unsteady and badly focused fly-on-the-wall style camera-work, with tasteless gross-out horror and also tasteless, due partly to its incongruity, Ricky Gervais-level comedy part of the mix.
I get the feeling District 9 is one of those Rorsach-inkblot type films where some viewers, blinded by some clever special effects and filmmakers' psychological techniques project on to it their own fantasies of what they take it to mean. I guess it has some referencing of apartheid, slum townships and other elements of South African politics and culture but with a frustrating lack of the specificity that more intelligent (and less zany) satire might achieve. These kind of films only hinder proper education, discussion and understanding because the person who's infatuated with the "message" of the film and has various enthusiastic "thoughts" and "beliefs" about it invariably assumes that their fellow interlocutor/victim knows what the hell they are rabbiting on about. Also, perhaps more tellingly, the ultra-violence and completely gratuitous battle scenes can only be enjoyed by someone with damage to the frontal lobe, which, to warn you, may in fact be damaged just by watching this utterly stupid film.
God only knows why I watched the whole hour and 40 minutes. Must visit the brain surgeon tomorrow.