My latest hopes were poured into District 9: A unique film that joins the talents of unknown (but promising) South African director Neil Blomkamp with well-known epic film connoisseur, Peter Jackson. District 9 tells a story of an alien race that has crash landed on Earth after an important direction module falls from their Mothership. The aliens leave their Mothership hovering over the populated South African City Johannesburg as the occupants descend from their ship in search of parts to restore their ride back home. The film follows the events of the conflict as planet Earth tries to cope with their new neighbors as well as simultaneously attempting to gain information on their advanced weaponry. Despite the promising concept: District 9 only proves to disappoint my expectations as the film constantly prefers to use the sword over the pen. That being said, there’s still some stimulating aspects of District 9, but they never rise above the rest of the crowd.

Wilkus holds up a badge, surely they'll cooperate respectfully

Instead of focusing on what District 9 could’ve been, let’s focus on what is in the film and how that fairs in comparison to its competitors. The narrative storytelling is a hybrid between fake-documentary style of shooting, mixed with the more traditional Hollywood execution. The film flip-flops between fictional interviews with made-up sociologists and news reporters and the standard “camera follows character’s actions” method. At first the jump between both styles is a little disorientating but as the plot continues it begins to favor the later, more straightforward method, making it easier to follow the events of the story.

Whenever people aren’t being interviewed on screen you’re likely to see one of two characters. The first and most prominent is Wikus van der Merwe, an appointed official whose job is to control the Alien occupation situation. The second is Christopher, one of the Alien “prawns” who’s attempting to restore energy back to his personal ship so he can repair the damages done to the Mothership. The two characters’ paths quickly cross over one another, and they soon figure out that they’ll have to work together to achieve a mututally beneficial goal. The problem is District 9 makes the false-assumption that audiences would care more about Wikus, as opposed to the more intriguing and unknown Christopher the alien. The majority of the film is dedicated to Wikus’ story, but you’ll find yourself wondering “When are we going to see Christopher’s side?”

I found the film's level of "awesome" directly correlated with this guy's screen time

However the characters prove to be less than unimportant around halfway through the film. Without spoiling anything, Wikus learns how to use the Alien weaponry, and then the story spirals into a variety of excuses to have firefights and explosions. From the halfway point till the end of the movie, there’s a constant barrage of bullets flying through the air and bodies imploding from extraterrestrial hazardous effects. To be fair to the focus of the film, the action scenes are remarkably well done. The advanced alien technology left the writers to think of a lot of creative ways to blow up the human body. You’ll see a plethora of crazy deaths that will keep you saying “Oh Snap!” even if it’s the tenth time you’ve seen the same execution.

To complement these high energy action sequences, the special effects of District 9 look fantastic. The Alien prawns look lifelike and realistic, and every weapon, mech, and ship looks like its a part of the world. The overall design of every fictional element in the movie is extremely well done; there’s an obvious level of detail that was intended and the efforts of the filmmakers and special effect crew have created one of the most impressive CGI effects in cinema.

Behold: The Mothership

The only inherit problem with District 9 is the expectations it may have set up. The first half sets up a lot of questions that you’ll assume will be answered in the second, but they never are. We never learn anything more about the Aliens than what we knew at the start, how they act, if they have social classes, how they reproduce, or even their basic anatomy. It might be a little bizarre to demand answers to all of these questions, but it’s more bizarre to leave every single question posed unanswered.

These complaints are specific to the type of person you are. So as long as you go into District 9 expecting a popcorn flick with stellar effects and impressive explosions, you’ll enjoy every second of the build up to the climax. It saddens me that District 9 wasn’t able to exalt the genre back into greatness (or at least create an interesting fictional alien race), but that’s a poor reason to look back on a film unfavorably. It might not be the latest and greatest creation in the Sci-Fi genre, but that doesn’t make it crap either.