I finally got around to seeing District 9. Without spoiling the movie, all I can say is that the presentation was interesting, the story was unique, and I wish humans would curl up and die already. More in-depth reviews and spoilers after the jump.

In normal science fiction, the aliens are more advanced than the humans, or at least everyone is suitably advanced to call it "science fiction." In District 9, the aliens are basically homeless, scavenging for scraps in a shantytown that doubles as a concentration camp. They spend their days trying not to get killed by the humans, and hoping that they'll find enough food to survive. Meanwhile, gangs and private corporate armies exploit, rob, and kill the aliens (whom they call "prawns") at every opportunity. District 9 is the name of this concentration camp (there is no mention of what happened to districts 1 through 8), and the camp is located in Johannesburg, which makes the entire movie a wink and nod to "hey, stop being such racists, South Africa!"

The movie itself is presented in sort of half documentary, half action movie. It's really rather confusing, because you're watching a regular movie, then it cuts away to people in sterile interview environments talking about the movie. There's also many times where the camera will cut to news broadcasts, so there are three storytelling methods involved. You have the "real," movie, the "news report as a means of revealing information" movie, and the "meta-movie" of the documentary portion. The documentary portion overlaps with the action movie portion, and it's unclear when one stops and the next begins. At the beginning of the movie, it's clear that the entire thing is documentary footage, but after a while it's obvious that no cameraman is following the characters in the context of the film. It's really kind of a hack job, to switch back and forth between "real camera man following the character in the movie" and "real cameraman following the character in real life (not in the movie shhhh)."

The documentary portion tells us that in the mid 1980s, an alien mothership drifted to a stop over Johannesburg, and a piece dropped off. Months later, the humans decided to fly up to the mothership, cut their way in, and see what's going on. They find thousands of "prawns" living in squalor, going so far as to set fires inside the ship to keep themselves warm. It's clear the alien society has degenerated into anarchy, and the humans waste no time in dropping all the aliens in a concentration camp, and clearing out the mothership looking for weapons.

Unfortunately, only an alien can fire an alien weapon, for reasons explained away with "bio engineering." This, naturally, doesn't stop the humans from collecting all the alien weapons, it just stops them from being useful. Since the aliens are physically powerful, the humans have established very strict "no breeding" rules and "no going outside your concentration camp" rules. The breeding goes on anyway, and soon the humans decide that they're going to force the aliens to relocate to a newer, much more cramped concentration camp called District 10. For some reason this involves serving the aliens with official eviction notices (despite them living in a government-owned concentration camp full of shanties and shacks), which is where the action-movie portion of the film starts us off.

We are shown a friendly, happy (white, naturally) South African man named Wikers. He has been chosen to lead the team of private military men serving the eviction notices. Wikers himself is actually a cubicle jockey, which leads to a lot of him giving ineffectual orders that are ignored by the real soldiers. For the first half hour or so, Wickers goes around basically being a tyrant, and laughing about it. In one scene he finds an alien nest, and tells the camera how illegal these kinds of things are. He then reaches in and kills the baby aliens, then laughs at the "popping" sound of their bodies bursting when they get hit by a flame thrower. It's horrible, even before the aliens are given personalities.

This is where the spoilers start

That quickly changes, however, when the non-documentary camera man shows us two aliens (and a ridiculously cute alien child) collecting "the liquid" from alien technology in a dump. Apparently for the last 20 years these two guys have been collecting this liquid in an attempt to go back to the mothership and fly back to their planet. Just as they finish collecting the last drop that they require, Wickers bursts in, serves an eviction notice, and inhales a big lungful of aerosolized "Liquid." The human thugs promptly murder one of the smart aliens for no reason, and confiscate the cylinder of liquid.

Wickers' inhalation of the liquid naturally starts transforming him into one of the aliens, because if there's one thing that fuel is good for, it's transforming one species into another with no other external stimuli. So Wickers gets very sick, and starts sprouting tentacles. Naturally, the first thing other humans think is "maybe he can shoot the alien weapons!" They quickly strap Wickers to a chair, and electrocute him until he agrees to kill aliens with alien guns. He can. The humans are delighted. They quickly proceed to dissect Wickers, while he's still conscious, in order to harvest his half-alien tissue so they can transplant it into soldiers who can then use beam weapons.

Luckily for Wickers, he manages to escape because they apparently strapped him down with masking tape rather than chains. Wickers flees to District 9, and insists that the smart alien (who we now find out is named Christopher) help him. Christopher agrees, despite the fact that Wickers is an asshole who took delight in murdering babies earlier that day. They soon hatch a plan to re-acquire the liquid so they can get back to the mothership and "fix" Wickers by turning him back into a human.

Wickers and Christopher assault the headquarters of the private paramilitary corporation that Wickers used to work for. Naturally, Wickers' access codes and badge still work, so they make it down to the alien autopsy lab without any problem. Christopher, upon being confronted with the autopsy lab, goes temporarily catatonic. Now that he knows the humans are experimenting on his people rather than simply murdering them, he suddenly has a whole new hatred for humans. Christopher changes his mind, and will not help Wickers first. Instead, he'll take the mothership and hightail it back to his home world, then return with a rescue team to save all his fellow aliens. Wickers, upon hearing that widespread genocide and experimentation takes precedent over his personal medical condition, knocks Christopher out, steals his only hope of returning home, and crashes it into the middle of District 9. Yes, really.

Through various contrivances in the following massive firefight, Christopher and his son manage to make it back to the mothership anyway (apparently they also had a mothership remote control, which they didn't want to use). They're almost murdered by a human, but Wickers saves them at the last minute while heroic music plays. Two of the 50,000 aliens escape, and that's apparently a "happily ever after" ending. The documentary portions make it clear that everyone considers Wickers a traitor to humanity for helping Christopher, and they're all "preparing" for when Christopher and the rescue party return.

Let me make this clear: I wish Wickers had been killed in the first 5 minutes. I would much rather have watched the story of Christopher and his friends attempting to return home against all odds, with the evil humans trying to kill them at every turn. The fact that the movie attempts to make Wickers out to be the "real hero" of the film was insulting. Maybe it would have been more palatable if they had stuck to the documentary film premise, but they kept switching to the action-movie format, so it made me feel like they wanted me to root for the humans, and I just wanted them all to die. What they did to the aliens was horrible and unforgivable, and whatever the aliens do when they return for their compatriots, the humans richly deserve it.

All this being said, the movie is still good. I enjoyed the mixed camera modes (except for when they interfered with the presentation) and I loved the universe they created. The idea of a technologically inferior alien race with access to things that nobody understands is fascinating. However, it made me hate the humans (as many recent sci-fi movies do) and I absolutely detested the "protagonist." If Wickers had been a better person, this movie would have been an AWESOME. As it is, their message was ruined in part by making the human into the "hero" of the end of the movie, when he was the one who caused all the problems to begin with. Couple that with the fact that the movie's presentation wasn't consistent, and it goes down to a WIN. Still worth seeing, though.