"District 9" (or D9 as they call it in the movie,) is a film with moments of heart. That makes up a bit for the total lack of logic in the plot. And I do mean total. Again, I don't do spoiler alerts so read on if you don't care (yes, I know that in itself is a spoiler alert - clever me.)
Okay, so we've got interstellar aliens who manage to cross parsecs of space in a ship that's the size of a city and yet we humans have to rescue this seemingly simple-minded race from themselves. Aliens, "prawns" - they look more like roaches to me - can't seem to manage actually getting out of their ship once it sorta "lands" on Earth. No, of course they logically hover around for a few days or weeks until we have to cut into the ship and find them all milling around, malnourished, in the ballroom - or whatever they're all doing when we cut this ship open using...well, I guess it doesn't matter - that bit of logic is left out too. A ship that large that can also tolerate the enormous stresses of outer space and Earth gravity can't possibly stand up to our titanium-bladed Black and Deckers.
We take them (hundreds!) and their incredibly powerful weapons (that they can't seem to figure out how to use on a race that's basically enslaving them and treating them like scum), and put them in a open-shanty town that ends up looking a lot like the slums of South Africa. Yes, yes, it's an apartheid metaphor - clever those filmmakers. Do they have bacteria? Who cares? Can they live in our atmosphere and gravity - we can find out - toss one outside. Are they susceptible to our bacteria and parasites? Dunno and don't care. Never mind that this is an ALIEN RACE that's visiting us - all we care about are their weapons - which we can't operate anyway because they're cleverly keyed to alien DNA - obviously the aliens thought ahead to when they'd meet us. Does no one think that this is the most monumental first contact in the history of mankind? Proof that life exists outside our solar system? How about we talk to them, treat them like the ambassadors from another world that they are, and find out all kind of stuff? Naw - that wouldn't suit the idiotic story the filmmakers contrive.
So years pass, they're mixing with other humans (even having sex with us - WTF? - How does that work exactly - I never saw any alien junk hanging from anything) and they've become garbage eaters - and we, of course, also eat them because some think we can absorb their essence (I am not making this up but unfortunately someone did.) When they're really good, we give them cat food (OMG) and they devour it like some idiotic animals - which they are, of course - I mean, certainly no one is worth talking to since whoever ran the ship apparently got lost in a "command module" and there's just stupid prawns left - unless you count this one alien dude who happens to use a bunch of discarded Earth technology to make holographic control modules and a mini-space ship under his shanty with his insectoid kid who is at least genius-level because he can run everything - and I mean everything, including a convenient exo-skeleton that comes out of nowhere so our human hero, who is turning alien - is that what that song "Turning Japanese" is really about? - can somehow fit into and make it work (because his DNA is mixed with alien DNA, doncha know?) and affect a rear-action while the alien dude and his son get to the mothership and promise to come back in three years for him. Huh? All those weapons - and I mean hundreds and hundreds of them - and this prawn can only think to get into the ship, go back to the home world, get his buddies and their baseball bats then come back to teach us Earthlings a lesson? Is nothing on that ship a weapon? He just made this amazing exo-skeleton out of old appliances that looks a lot like a cross between the movable crane in "Aliens" and the ED209 from "Robocop" and he can't do anything but fly home? Holy E.T.!
Argh!
It gets dumber. The prawns mentioned above have this mini-ship, see. They're gonna use it to get to the big-ass momma ship, still hovering over Johannesburg. But a Somali warlord (or some such shit) who is trading in prawn meat and useless alien weapons hits the mini-ship with an RPG and damages it thwarting the great escape. So what to do, what to do? I know, we'll just power up the holo-controls and bring the farging ship to us! And it'll suck the mini-ship up into the mama-ship and we'll escape while the human, in his exoskeleton, gets shot over and over again thereby providing a false emotional moment. Now why didn't we think of this in the first place? Hard to figure out - we aliens actually have the controls that will interface with the mothership and control it. And it has this neat tractor beam that can draw things up to it - like all the farging prawns. Now isn't that special? My Lord - the lapses in logic in this film were bigger than anything Michael Bay ever dreamed of in Transformers I/II. Isaac Asimov and the pioneers of scifi are collectively rolling around in their graves. Zombie Golden Age SciFi Writers come back from the dead and kill everyone in Hollywood. Film at eleven.
D9 is well-shot, well-acted, and visually stunning - but this is by far one of the dumber scifi films I've seen. Even "Alien Nation" was scads better - and I never *ever* thought I'd say that.
"District 9" is Alien Nation meets The Fly meets Transformers meets National Lampoon's anything vacation - and all those movies individually were better thought out. Even video games make more sense.
