District 9 - One Giant Plot Hole

Rating: 6/10 (23 August 2009)

Don't get me wrong, it was an enjoyable enough movie with seamlessly merged CG and an incredibly realistic feel to all of the scenes; it was very immersive that way. Lots of interesting weaponry too. And it was kind of nice to have a big-screen flick that doesn't act as if the US is the only country on earth.
But the movie had some very serious plot issues.
The idea of District 9 is that the aliens came to Earth malnourished and somehow stranded, and thus became reliant on the humans. "Interesting premise," we all think to ourselves watching the trailer, "I wonder how they will explain all that." Well, they don't. It is never explained how this happened. How a ship full of over a million well-armed aliens ends up stranded in a slum on Earth for a few decades.
And there is a good reason they don't explain this, because the entire movie doesn't make a lick of sense once it is explained. They're stranded because they lack some sort of fluid for control/fuel for the mother ship. At one point it is explained that alien technology itself contains this fluid, and that there's enough lying in junkyards on earth to take the ship home. But this alien technology presumably came from the alien mother-ship... right? So then they must have had enough fuel all along, in which case the aliens were never stranded at all and there was never any reason for them to be stuck on earth or leave their ship. The entire premise of the movie is not logically sound.
Maybe most viewers can overlook that, but when the singular instigating event of a movie, the point of making it even, doesn't make a bit of sense it's a serious impediment to my enjoyment of a movie. If you feel like this too, then don't bother with District 9 in the theatres.