"District 9" - C

I purposefully avoided reviews and fanboy hype about "District 9" before seeing it on opening night. I entered with just a general understanding about the movie's premise and without any expectations for the production.

I feel confident that things would have gone much much better had Peter Jackson actually been at the helm rather than behind the scenes.....

Summary: Goofy-looking aliens decide to park their seemingly busted space craft over Johannesburg to live, procreate and annoy the locals. The creatures dubbed "the prawns" are herded into a slum to live under the regulatory control of a governmental agency, which decides the aliens should move from the slums into a concentration camp away from their human neighbors.

Much of how the story is told comes in a "mock-umentary" format intermingled with news clips, interviews and some oddly placed third-person perspectives. It's all over the place and not in a good enjoy-the-ride kind of way.

And plot development drags and bounces from one inconsistent or somewhat illogical position into another head-scratching moment of overall unpleasantness. It's like someone wanted to cram parts of "Alien Nation" with "Starship Troopers" with a human rights drama about apartheid. It didn't work, and it wasn't entertaining.

There are some pretty interesting action sequences, but the CG on a lot of the alien full-body scenes is only a cut above rendered graphics from a gaming console. The work on the ship is much better than a lot of other CG-dependent stuff you might have seen lately.

This movie is not groundbreaking territory for the genre - it's a mess of a story with a messy way of conveying itself. Again, Peter Jackson would have taken the time to get it right and make it watchable.

Overall I think "District 9" should be taken as a the quirky, dark and sticky summer flick it's meant to be. Do not look for this one to shatter the sci-fi scene, make you re-think films in general or otherwise blow you away.

Grade: C (rent it or see it at the second-run dollar theater)