First let me ask, do we really need 15 different links for the same film? I am putting my review under this link even though I have no idea if the showing of this film was blu-ray, single disc, double disc or just something from cable or netflix. I guess I thought it was too shallow to ask.

All that aside, I am kinda on the fence about this film. It is an interesting mix of the alien invasion theme and the those who govern are now governed theme. I had a hard time getting into it because of the appearance of the aliens. To me they looked like humanoid cockroaches and not like the “prawns” they were called. I would have called them giant bugs.

Anyway, lots of action and arrogance. To me this was just another film that brought to light our arrogant stupidity as humans. We think we are so superior and yet all we do is continue our barbaric ways. Kill them, kill them all…yeah because that has worked so well for us in the past millennium. I am really getting tired of films that glorify our shortcomings.

Franz Kafka would have loved this. Documentary-style film about alien beings (“prawns”) stranded in South Africa and corraled into District 9 near Johannesburg. The head of a task force to relocate them becomes “infected” by an alien liquid and begins to morph into a prawn. You can’t help but get drawn into the absurdity of it. Very deserving of its Oscar nomination.

It’s a docudrama about what if alien refugees came from another planet. Quite a bit gory and with quite a few twists on the old alien meets human stories, it reminded me a bit of the Men in Black movies, without the humor. What you end up with was something I was curious enough to watch all the way through, but not quite as satisfying as you would want. The military stereotypes are nearly identical as Avatar. It would have been a better film if the characters were a bit more real and not quite as cartoon-like.

I had a hard time caring about the main characters and thought it was lacking in tension. But I liked the twist on the typical aliens-making-contact movies.

Here’s a link to the short version for those who haven’t seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlgtbEdqVsk

The original short that this was based on was skillful, insightful and disturbing. But the major reason for that, the “interviews”, are missing from the full-length film and that really, really cripples it. This starts out strong and just disintegrates into a mess, trying to fill in too many plot and time gaps with all the sci-fi they could cram in.