District 9 is a movie that has been incredibly well received by apparently everyone. It currently has an amazing 90% on rotten tomatoes and was quickly called the “Best summer movie”. I just don’t get it. I have seen the movie and I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. Now, I have seen and hear a few people say that “words can’t do it justice” or they just can’t explain it, but I think I can tell you why I DIDN’T like this movie.

 

First off, this movie was painful to watch. Litterally. This movie hurt my eyes. I know that, for some reason, recent movies have decided to throw away their tripods, but District 9 decided to give their cameras to 7 year olds on a sugar rushes. Every scene is constantly shaking, most images are blurry and the angle changes about every 5 seconds. The only static shots are ones from security cameras which are at bad angles and in black and white. I think the original intent for constant movie cameras was because of the framing, but that has its own problems which I’ll get to a little later. But all you need to know for now is that this movie honestly did move too much, even by modern standards. Literally hurting me… this movie is off to a great start.

 

So, what do the cameras at least attempt to focus their attention on most of the time? Why, our hero of course. At this moment, I can’t recall a protagonist I have hated as much yet. I think the main reason is that he is an idiot. For example, a big part of the plot relies on the fact that he accidentally sprays himself in the face with an unidentified alien fluid. To boot, he starts having health issues soon after. Yet he constantly refuses to see a doctor. This man was assigned to manage a very delicate and very dangerous relocation program, but after spraying himself with an alien fluid that could be doing god knows what to his body he never goes to a doctor and just takes the risk of dyeing and infecting everyone he knows and cares about. Beyond just making stupid decisions he also has an amazing inability to never learn from them. He seemed to be constantly surprised to learn that people aren’t nice and that they might want to hurt him. I think in grade school, this was the kid that would look when you pointed and said “hey look over there!” and then just say “aw man, not again” when he saw you ate his chicken nuggets while his head was turned.

 

Now, maybe this movie could have been good for me if I would have had the hope that he could die at any moment, but it quickly became apparent that the main characters of the movie were protected by Deux Ex Machinas, meaning they could stroll in front of a firing squad and all bullets would miss them. Despite human and alien weapons constantly fired at them, main characters are impervious to weapons while anyone around them attracts bullets like a magnet. This happens in a lot of movie, true, but this one seems to make an effort to make it obvious. Even in the final confrontation, the hero is about to die, but of couse his Deux Ex is stronger then the one of the guy about to kill him and he gets saved quite randomly. It just become stupid after a while.

 

It’s odd that this movie has such a big flaw making it so unrealistic when it tries so hard to be realistic. The sounds are quite good and incomparable and the aliens are different but very believable, but that’s not how they try to be real. Apparently, I missed the memo that the word “real” was synonymous with “gross”. I don’t mean that the aliens look disgusting to me, like I said, I like them, but there is a lot of vomit, puss, infection, garbage and bloody body parts from different living (or formerly living) organisms. I do understand that this it is true that there are a lot of garbage covered slums in this world and when people get sick it’s not pretty, but its still gross. I will put it aside and agree with everyone that it is realistic in that aspect, but that makes it out of place since there are so many other aspects that make this movie unrealistic.

 

Alright, well I guess I should talk about the plot now. Another problem with this movie is that it suffers from plot ADD. It starts out with an alien ship coming to earth and doing nothing but hover over Johannesburg for a few months before humans decide to do anything. When they cut themselves in, they find a bunch of malnourished aliens that they decide to bring down to earth. Where do the aliens come from? Why did they come to earth? How did we know they weren’t contaminated with an alien disease or that we might contaminate THEM? None of this explained, instead we get people saying how they were surprised the aliens weren’t angelic or something like that (cause the ones from Aliens is so freakin cute?). So instead of answering these obvious questions, we learn that they were placed on earth away from normal society because people can’t handle them or something stupid and ignorant like that. We also talk a lot about how they found weapons on the ship, but it only works with alien DNA. Again, how did we learn their language? How did they learn ours? What attempts at actual communication were there? Why do we trust the aliens enough to put them on our planet if they had so many dangerous weapons? Well once again, it seems that there are no answers as we move to our next plot point which is that the Prawns (the names given to the aliens) are becoming over populated and have to be relocated. So now we enter our hero (which I’m not going to dignify with a name) who has to serve all the aliens eviction notices and get them to sign a paper. Thrilling, eh? So we follow his stupid bubbling attempts at this until he sprays himself with the fluid I mentioned earlier which was gathered by an alien named Christopher (he’s cool, so he gets his name). He also seemed to be the first person to read the paper and argue that it’s illegal, so that gives him more awesomeness. But alas, we move away from Christopher and completely forget about the eviction of the aliens until the end of the movie to concentrate on our hero who’s been getting sicker and sicker (still never mentioning how he sprayed himself). It ends up his DNA has been shifting to become one of the Prawns. That’s when his company starts trying to kill him since he is now a human with the ability to work the alien weapons (though they never ask him really how he did this). That’s the basic plot, after that our hero (seriously, why do I call him that, there’s not really much heroic about him, he’s more of a victim) tries not to get killed while still making bad choices.

 

Now, at the start of the movie, everything was presented “documentary” style (Mocumentary, if you will). I actually found this a little clever, but annoying, mostly due to random cut-aways where people explained everything out front for us (more on that later) and the cameras, which I already explained how bad they are. But as the movie progressed, it made less and less sense that someone was following everyone around with cameras (mostly since it became a manhunt) this framing was forgotten until the end. But of course the crappy cameras remained for reasons I don’t understand. To me, this just seemed like a bad choice and a lack of commitment on the writer’s part: either omit the frame because it doesn’t work or find a way to make it work. Don’t just forget about it cause it’s inconvenient to you.

 

But now we get to the heart of the movie, the whole reason the movie was made: the social commentary. It basically goes down to this: “racism and war are bad.” There, I just saved you 2 hours of eye pain. The really bad thing about the movie is that they are actually almost as upfront as I just was, with lines like “it’s like a concentration camp” or “it was always about the weapons.” Go see my Up review on how a message should be subtly put it: they did the opposite. Not that it was any less obvious before hand… Sorry this paragraph is so short, but I’m just really sick of talking about this movie.

 

I seriously can’t figure out why this movie is so popular. Its message is too obvious, the document style cameras were painful and unoriginal, the hero is unlikable, you know all the main characters are going to be just fine and the plot has so many holes it looks like Swiss cheese to me. The only good aspect is that it looks and sounds good, and Christopher was a character I actually kind of felt for. To me, this movie would be the equivalent of covering a MacBook in garbage, shaking a camera around and quoting random facts about the holocaust: it would be as “real” and as “deep.” I didn’t like this movie and I will keep on defending that fact. I give this movie a 3/10 and just ask you not to listen to the hype! I just still can’t figure out why everyone likes this movie…

 

Hey, Doug Walker didn’t like it either! SWEET! The world seems a little bit better now.