Last night, I finally saw District 9. I had been waiting to see it since the beginning of the summer, but I just never got the time to go to the theater. So I put it at the top of my Netflix queue about a month ago, and I received it in the mail yesterday--the first day of its DVD release.

I had been excited because the movie had gotten such high reviews from just about every source I read (Yahoo! movies- A-/B+, Rotten Tomatoes- 90%, Metacritic- 81/100), and the trailer and premise were interesting.

Now, after watching the movie, I am baffled by how bad it was. If you plan to see it and you care about possible spoilers, stop reading. But I would just say you should skip it and spend your time doing something more worthwhile.

Basically, the script is poor, the directing is bad, and the fake documentary style doesn't work. The worst defect of the movie, though, is that it bills itself as having been inspired by the conditions and events in South Africa's District Six, while portraying the aliens almost universally as unintelligent, animalistic, expendable, flat, and undeserving of the viewers' sympathy.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing about this (even though I strongly feel that the overwhelming praise for the film deserves a well-developed response), so here are just a few of my suggestions to the filmmakers for when they start on the inevitable sequel:

• if alien technology/guns are entwined with alien biology to the point that you need alien DNA to operate them, then please use creative artistic design to come up with props that appeal to our imagination and are new and different rather than digging up old Robocop memorabilia and asking us to accept that an alien trigger can't be pulled by a human finger.
• When the evil corporation's ruthless CEOs are weighing whether to murder and harvest body parts from the main character, perhaps they could do it somewhere other than next to the operating table where the main character is strapped, and where they will soon attempt to cut out his heart without sedation/anesthesia. Also, it would be nice to see some debate beyond a flippant "let's do it."
• When basing the experience of an alien species on the real experience of a tragically oppressed group of actual humans, don't portray 99% of the aliens negatively, and don't make the agent of the oppressive government the hero.
• Shootouts and roid-rage bad guy meatheads have been done before (and better), so give us a better enemy to fight.
• Action and sci-fi are ok; action and sci-fi + believable emotional responses, moral/ethical complexity, and well-developed relationships between characters = better.