"E.T. phone home" but far far better.

Rating: Null/10 (15 March 2010)

Filmed with what at least appears to have been a fairly cheap video camera, in order to give D9 a more documentary feel - and yet injected with all these impressive CGI effects. This unique combination is primarily what sets the movie apart from the plethora of increasingly dull sci-fi films made in recent years. That, and the manic direction and D9's off-the-wall events.
D9 starts off very much in a Christopher Guest mockumentary vein ("For Your Consideration", "Waiting for Guffman" etc.), it's a sci-fi but with obvious leanings towards comedy. Not particularly funny, but definitely interesting. Johannesburg as the setting was a refreshing change.
As unusual as it is, the story has a major flaw: first we are watching a sci-fi comedy, with a highly animated central character, but somewhere around the half-way mark the film starts getting increasingly serious, this inexplicable "change-of-heart" in D9's mood being underlined by a quasi-Mid-East-sounding soundtrack doodling melodramatically in the background. So now we're suddenly expected to take this man seriously? The same character who looked as if he had escaped from a Loony Toons cartoon just 45 minutes earlier. To expect that kind of switch from the audience is asinine. But then, of course, most viewers are easily manipulated sheep.