I promise you, it’s not.
Errm, Blomkamp was a commercial/music video director
And I, a South African, back you up.
I saw it a couple of days ago and thought it was fantastic. Okay, the story was complete SF cliches (bigot becomes the object of his hatred, evil corporation abusing people for weapons) and it had the standard plot hole for these fugitive movies (if he went public the minute he escaped then the villain’s evil scheme would have collapsed as fast as their stock price) but it was the atmosphere of the film that sold me. I thought the first half done documentary style was much more interesting than the second half done action movie style but the action movie stuff was still put together well.
I find myself hoping for a sequel. And not for the continuation of this story but because I think District 9 is wide open for a lot of interesting stories.
I don’t think that’s really a plot hole as I doubt that would be anyone’s normal reaction if they broke out of jail with a hideous disfigurement and people after him trying to kill him.
As for a sequel, I would love to see what would happen if in three years, when there’s a huge military build-up and the prawns are treated better so as not to look bad, the aliens DON’T show up. Maybe Christopher couldn’t convince them that saving the prawns was worth it so he comes back on his own in a small ship to save Wikus, like he promised. Meanwhile the world is on edge not knowing if the entire Prawn armada might show up at any moment.
Everyone’s an amateur professional critic around here. As if a movie can’t use some genre cliches and still be good. For that matter, AS IF a movie is EVER going to be completely cliche-less and groundbreaking and still be commercially successful in this country.
Anyway, unintentional laughs were brought by the pixillation of the aliens’ mugs in “Alive in Joburg.”
That was covered by their campaign to preemptively discredit Wilkus so he wouldn’t be believed.
Right, which kicks in a few hours after he escapes. If he escapes and then phones the television station the whole plan falls apart (and that’s assuming that MNU controlled all the security forces as the movie implied). They’re a public corporation and if a guy with an alien hand shows up on world wide television, transforming into an alien in view of the public, and talks about how the CEO of a company directly ordered his murder then MNU is screwed. Not just screwed, but royally screwed. We’re talking potentially pushing the company into bankruptcy screwed. The collapse of the stock price, the flood of government investigators from every single branch who will then pour over everything. They’ll start with denials but this whole thing is impossible to cover up; they did half of it in public after all.
It’s a flaw a lot of “innocent man on the run” movies have, especially when the villain is an evil corporation. The negative publicity and easily corroborated facts in those cases would break a Microsoft or a Wal-Mart. Which is why you won’t find many corporations in the real world with their own private death squads (other than Blackwater, of course).
(And what the hell does “amateur professional critic” mean, anyway? No matter how I parse it that phrase is idiotic.)
Except that Wikus isn’t Harrison Ford. He’s a terrified, mentally and physically traumatized office worker who just got placed into the most horrific situation of his entire life by a very wide margin. He’s injured. He’s exhausted. He’s probably already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. People in his circumstances don’t do the “smart” or “logical” thing. They do the instinctive thing.
Wikus was just subjected to near-vivisection, and is all too aware that a giant multinational corporation is actively hunting him. Is it any surprise that, in his current state of mind, all he can think of is running the fuck away? Especially given the reaction he gets from any normal human who sees his condition? Why would he think that the folks at Local News Station (who, based on their broadcasts, aren’t exactly known for their pro-alien bias) would react any differently?
It’s the same reason Wikus turns on Christopher later in the movie. I’ve seen people criticizing that as a plot hole as well, which just makes me think that these people haven’t bothered to think the plot through themselves. Again, Wikus’s actions may not make sense from a strictly rational standpoint, but given his current circumstances, it would be an even bigger stretch for him to act strictly rational. It makes perfect sense that his decisions emerge out of blind panic 90% of the time, because he doesn’t have the time nor (at this point) the mental capacity to think them through.
I just saw this and wanted to write what I thought before reading what anyone else has said.
The movie promised to be totally fucking awesome.
It wasn’t, it was just pretty cool. Which for any other movie would be high praise, but this one reached farther. It had great characters, and their struggles were emotionally compelling.
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Super-advanced alien races that are both smarter and more compassionate than humans are not good analogues for apartheid where a technologically superior race subjugated a technolonogically inferior one. If they wanted to make a real commentary on apartheid, then the aliens would be the white people and the humans would be the blacks in that scenario.
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The Deus Ex Machina at the end where the little kid fixes the mothership was well, kind of cheesy.
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There are only three proactive prawns in all of District 9, really? Only three trying to get out of their predicament while 1.5m of their brethren get high off of cat food?
Those three plotholes made it difficult for me to love this movie. And I don’t love it, those are some serious glaring plotholes. They better bring me a war with an alien race movie in District 10 to make up for shortcomings that were not insumountable by any means in the first one.
The power armor scene was damn cool though. I did like how MNU was a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy, though if there was money from alien technology to be had, that sort of corruption wouldn’t have lasted for twenty years. Their networks would have been secure and trump-tight by the time the movie takes place.
All in all it was a pretty good movie, I liked how they set you up to think that Wikas was an ok guy, and then you realize he’s a casual bastard and then he redeems himself in the end.
The abortion scene in the beginning was the most disturbing part of the whole movie to me. It really showed how their whole corporate culture was sociopathic.
Heh. So you think. You really don’t know much about the Mouseketeers, do you?
The prawns in the ship were all a bunch of stupid hive workers. All the smart leaders had died.
That was a hypothesis. So if Christopher was so smart why didn’t he organize the workers?
He tried to get one guy to help him and look how well that worked out. He told him to be nice, and he ended up getting in a fight with the MNU.
Well that seemed like a well established working relationship between those two. And the other guy got in a fight with the MNU in order to provide a distraction so that Christopher could escape.
Uh oh, here we go again. 
He specifically told the guy repeatedly to be nice to the MNU guys so they wouldn’t investigate.
I still haven’t seen the movie, it doesn’t open in SA until the end of the month damnit, but a movie that took this approach would still not be a commentary about apartheid because the subjugation took place long before apartheid was created.
A key feature of apartheid was the forced movement of communities based on the governments desire to physically seperate the races as completely as possible. The movie is looking at one aspect of apartheid, the creation of new segregated communities. People were forced to live in specific areas and their movements outside of those areas were stricly regulated.
And the people being repressed were not technologically inferior in 1948, they lived in cities, owned cars, went to university. This was one of the reasons for apartheid, to stop the further advancement of non-whites and attempt to turn the clock back and create a non-sophisticated, non threatening population.
For me, and it’s more than possible that I’m totally missing the point here, but I didn’t feel that the movie was supposed to be a detailed, in-depth allegory for apartheid. It was only supposed to be reminiscent of apartheid, to make the viewer think about the issues involved. At least that’s what I took away from it, but of course I am hardly an expert on the topic of either filmmaking or apartheid. 
The director came up with a half assed backstory about the lower level prawns being hive workers, its possible that Chris simply did not give off the proper pheromones that the queen would , to direct the workers. Add to that, they had been on earth for twenty years and the population doubled, the second and third generation prawns with no education may have been simply just above savages in a tech world.
And to boot , they may have a cat food addiction that renders them somewhat bipolar. I expect however that if a sequel is made, and a case may be made that for the money the movie made, its now on sonys radar for a sequel that a more “professional approach” the sequel will include a more well thought out back story that would explain some of the plot.
Declan