District 9: Worst-Best Movie Of The Year

Rating: 2/10 (29 June 2010)

The fact that this movie generated as much hype as it did is ridiculous. No one seems to be able to put a critical eye on this film. It is an absolutely awful film...and here is why.
The story: Basically aliens are stranded on Earth after their ship crash/float lands? on Earth. They are found aboard their ship dying of hunger and are relocated to district nine which eventually becomes a slum. First problem I have is the fact the movie states there are 1.8 million aliens here and yet all you ever see is empty houses. Throughout the entire movie, you can count the number of different aliens you see and it works out to be around forty. Where are the overhead shots with millions of aliens wandering around? Instead all we get are the expansive slums which appear empty. Next issue is the way it was filmed. What the heck is so unique about it? It is filmed as a sort of past/present interview style throughout, some of which is real time and some of which is in the past. It is a mess and does not make this movie special. Anyone who is amused by it clearly has too much of a fetish for Peter Jackson or Neill Bloomkamp. I mean, this movie was the go-to option for a scrapped Halo production...its a useless bunch of junk produced on low budget leftovers. The spaceship is the only cool image throughout the entire film...that and some of the overhead shots of the landscape. That is it. The rest is like a cheap B or C movie. One guy going out of his way to help three aliens, one who dies and one who is a kid. So much about this movie is left unexplained...what or where do these few aliens find that black goo? I assumed it was from that piece of their spaceship that falls off, like maybe its the fuel tank or something? Either way, why are there remnants of this black goo scattered about the slums? If this piece of the ship fell it would break in one area, leaving the search for this fuel or whatever relatively easy. Furthermore, why are ONLY three aliens looking for it? The other aliens don't even seem to care about getting home. It just seems very stupid. Oh and don't forget the goo turns humans into aliens. This just all seemed like it was dreamt up while someone was on the toilet...okay, lets have aliens and call them prawns, they can eat cat food and there are these three who wanna get home but they have to search for this magic fuel and there is the guy who gets it on him and the stuff turns him into a prawn. That is the movie in a sentence.
Now I get the reference to the apartheid that occurred in South Africa but I would much rather see an actual film on it. Why twist in aliens? And bad aliens to boot...anyone who thinks they looked "cool" is just being ridiculous. These aliens were the most uninteresting aliens I have ever seen. CGI was well wasted there. Back to the historical reference, I just failed to connect or even care. There was no emotion which should and could have been drawn from a properly written plot. You get to cheer for one alien, one kid alien and a guy with an alien arm. Oh and to ruin the ending, the two aliens get away and the guy turns into one and becomes a brooding prawn plucking petals from a plastic petunia. Ta daaa. I commend Jackson and Bloomkamp for duping almost everyone who has watched this into thinking it is astounding...it is not. I hated it, I fell asleep because the action was so cheap and underwhelming. This movie never should have received the praise it has gotten. It just underwhelmed me to the max. I mean, Mikus (the main human character) wanted to relocate the aliens until he was infected with black spray/goo. Then he wanted a cure for himself so he helps two aliens (not the entire race) escape. Some people will say the deeper meaning is that he becomes more humane the less human he becomes...all I see is a greedy little office nerd who wants his arm back. Great message.
To summarize...bad CGI aliens, bad film style, weak plot twist on a historical event, low budget look (seriously we see slums that look more empty than full, hardly any aliens anywhere...not that I want to see them as they are poorly created), typical/predictable outcome and a lot was left unexplained (the fuel/alien spray, the guns, why they landed/crashed, why the didn't fight back if there was 1.8 million of them...oh right there was actually only 40, why they didn't use their weapons since the humans could not). Basically this is a pansy alien movie for pansy moral seeking deep minded blow hards who THINK this movie means more. Well it does not. It is simply the remnants of a scrapped Halo film pieced together by Jackson and Bloomkamp in an "oh-look-interviews-film-style-this-is-so-unique" style that is really just cheap.
Watch it...you will probably like it. If you do, you are simply a slave to cinema, accepting that because someone like Ebert says its good, then it is. Think on the dark side of the moon for once, and just remember what Pink Floyd said.