Sam-Who-Likes-Nothing - District 9
This should have been great. Man, what an idea. I mean think of the cool science fiction fun you could have with shipwrecked aliens on Earth, and they breed, so Earth ghettoizes them, and then, really, what are you going to do when they start competing with an overcrowded earth for resources? Very, very cool.
But no. That’s not where District 9 runs with it. Instead we have to belabor an already obvious metaphor by sticking the aliens in an already apartheid South Africa, and all the humans have to be venal brutal militarists, and the hero is an oblivious moron who’s as racist as everyone else till he has a catharsis for no reason at all at the end of the movie and helps the aliens get away. Oh, and the Blair Witch thing at the beginning and the end was really, really annoying. What, you’re not a good enough writer to work the exposition into the story?
But it was SF, and some of it was pretty cool, especially the smart alien.
