Interesting 'District 9' comes up short

Imagine that a million refuges from another world arrived in South Africa and these aliens resembled insects. Now imagine that after 20 years of living in one internment camp, a multinational corporation is tasked with evicting them and moving them to another camp. That would be the story of "District 9."

"District 9" is several different movies. The framing device is a documentary. Indeed, portions of the documentary almost seem like an episode of "The Office." But the movie is also a SciFi action movie with plenty of alien technology and lots of violent gun play. Then there's plenty of social commentary. The South Africans don't want the aliens which they derisively refer to as 'prawns.' All the stranded aliens really want to do is go home. They are being exploited by both Multi-National United, the firm charged with moving the aliens, and a gang of Nigerians. And both parties want the same thing: access to the aliens' weapons technology which seems to be keyed to work only for them and thus is useless to humans.

That changes when MNU employee Wikus van der Merwe is exposed to a substance that begins changing him into an alien. In the process, Wikus becomes connected to one of the prawns and not only helps the prawn recover the substance but helps the alien and his son escape, thus setting up the possibility of a sequel.

This is another movie with the color bleached out. The CGI aliens and their ship are fully realized and believable. The powered armor sequence is worthy of "Iron Man." And there's plenty of carnage. The main failing of the movie is that it tries to be too many things and fails to adequitely focus on its natural theme.

The movie is a decent diversion and offers a new spin on the alien invasion film. It should have been a stronger statement and could have been better if it had put less emphasis on formuliac approaches based on alien tech inspired violence and focused on the 'humanitarian disaster' that alien refugees had both created and were facing. That would have been something to move the genre forward.