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District 9 is a bit of a disappointment. It’s not a terrible movie but it lacks a certain amount of passion that would have been nice to see.

What happens when aliens land on our planet? Well you’d think they’d just harvest all we have, blow us up, and leave. But District 9 takes a more moderate approach (if there is one.) Instead of landing here to land here, the reason why they landed is unknown. All that director Neill Blomkamp really explains to us is that when we finally made contact with the aliens, they needed help. So the South African government, (this movie takes place in Johannesburg), helps out the aliens by setting up temporary living quarters that become a much more permanent thing than it was meant to be. Johannesburg had enough of the aliens living around them so they hired a corporation to move them to a different settlement. The man in charge of the project, Wikus Van De Merwe finds himself in over his head at the beginning and even more over his head when he finds himself in the middle of an escalating crisis between the alien ‘prawns’ and the humans of South Africa.

The movie starts out as a documentary piece and then moves into a more traditional movie. This is where it starts to throw you off. It’s meant to be a seamless transition and it’s not. Why not just divide it traditionally and shave a few minutes off of the long introduction part of the movie? The other part of the movie that really struggles is the constant subtitles. The humans can understand the prawns even though they talk with a weird gargling sound- we’re relegated to reading everything they say and it makes it almost impossible to connect with them as characters or to truly appreciate the work it took to make them. It wouldn’t take anything away from the film to just let them talk with crappy gargling accents instead of making us read the whole time.

District 9 was a great idea for a movie. It just wasn’t implemented very well. It’s hard to follow everything on the screen at once due to the subtitles and it’s even harder to enjoy the action due to the constant influx of poor transitions. It was a great idea for a movie but ultimately a disappointment. It has its moments but this is a movie to rent, not a movie to own.