District 9 (Single-Disc Edition)

addle-headed (2010-09-09) Rating: 2/5
I admit the final half hour or so of this was extremely good, but I hated it virtually from the first few minutes.

Several believability problems:

1. Housing the aliens wouldn't have been a hassle! For something like that, countries would be vying to host them -- for research purposes, if nothing else. The UN would probably have to maintain a waiting list.
1. How are you gonna fit 1.5 million creatures in that ship?
2. Civilizations in which when the leader dies, the masses are helpless and directionless are not civilizations that perfect interstellar travel.
3. The ship wouldn't have flown at the end! It had been there for like 20 years! Human engineers would have torn that thing apart by then!
4. Humans would have been able to activate the aliens' weapons by using their severed limbs.

So literally the movie is impossible to swallow. This leaves us with its allegorical meanings.

This, also, was repugnant. Not for a second could I buy the filmmakers' heavy-handed metaphor of the aliens as refugees. Are they trying to say the prejudice against aliens is analogous to the prejudice against immigrants in our own society? If so, they could have done a much better job showing how the fear of aliens might have some rational underpinnings. As it was, it was as if the humans' fear and hatred of the aliens was completely baseless. If we had been told that the aliens had had, say, some equivalent to Koran 47:3, then the movie wouldn't have struck me as so simplistically one-sided.
District 9 - Review (2010-09-08) Rating: 5/5
District 9 is as close to a perfect sci-fi film as can be made. By that I mean that the film almost perfectly uses technology to help understand the human condition. Much hay has been made of the films easy comparisons to apartheid South Africa but I really think this is a disservice. The film has grander ambitions; what makes us human and what makes us monsters.

Part of the perfection is the brilliantly simple story construction. The story begins with humans and alien living parallel lives, separate and inequal. The aliens are vilified and made as to be sub-human monsters. The humans are kind benefactors. As the story progresses these parallel existences begin to merge and reverse. By the end of the film, the humans are the monsters and the aliens are human. When you leave the theater you are left wondering at what point did the humans become monsters and vice versa.

This is a very simple structure but what makes it brilliant is an ingenious plot device. The primary character undergoes a metamorphosis both psychologically and physically. Early on in the story the protagonist is exposed to strange substance. Needless to day this has a profound effect on him. The substance alters his biology; transforming him into one of the aliens.

Using this transformation as a dramatic vehicle, the main character looses his ethnocentrism and begins to see the barbarity of his own species and begins to see the humanity in the aliens. The humans are enslaved to greed and violence; served by the mega-corps and drug gangs wanting to harness alien weapon and enrich themselves. The aliens simply want to go home.

Now, all of this sounds very introspective and high minded, and it is, but the film doesn't let it drag things to a crawl. It stays fast paced and action packed with plenty of special effects. It is not until after the movie is finished and your driving home does it really start to sink in; the bigger messages revealed.

I really enjoyed this movie. It is as close to perfect as one could expect from a modern film.
Awful and stupid (2010-09-07) Rating: 1/5
I did not like this movie at all. It was so awful I had to retire it to my never ever watch again file.
Begs for a sequel (2010-08-23) Rating: 4/5
District 9 is an interesting account of ghetto aliens, trying to survive on a hostile planet following the breakdown of their spaceship. The lead character, a human, is our hero, if a bit selfish, and unable to see a larger picture. It's a good yarn, and I hope a sequel is made to help fix all the bad things that happened.
9 out of 10 (2010-08-17) Rating: 5/5
Plot: 9 out of 10, Acting: 8 out of 10, Visual Effects: 10 out of 10, Overal Effect: 9 out of 10