Release Date: August 14, 2009

(out of 4)

They have arrived. They hover above Johannesburg, South Africa in a massive spaceship freight that is indefinitely stalled. They are aliens that are a halfway meet between an upright cockroach and a lobster and they stand seven feet tall. They dwell inside a massive refugee camp in "District 9," a rare action mockumentary – that sounds like a novel recipe for a movie. In this grimy and dirty setting, the movie has a few good gross chuckles but nevertheless runs dry by its third act.

The aliens, called Prawns, are not new to the planet. They’ve been in Johannesburg for twenty years. But the country is fed up and now they want to relocate 1.1 million aliens to a smaller, more tidy, and more out of the way living quarters. One problem right there is that the film never gives you the sense that there are anywhere near 1.1 million Prawns. At best we only see a few dozen at a time.

The camera crew in this mockumentary follows Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a bureaucrat from Multi-National United (MNU) in charge of leading the transport of this alien race to a new camp that will be “worse like a concentration camp.” Wikus is a British numbskull, sort of a halfway meet between Mr. Bean, a Simon Pegg character and a Dutch comedian of which I don’t know any names. In the course of the story, Wikus will contract an alien virus which will mutate his human flesh into Prawn flesh. He will become a mortal target of MNU, will be fired at by mercenaries and commandos, will ally with sympathetic Prawns (read subtitles) and will eat the same thing that Prawns eat which is cat food. All the while, MNU looks in self-interest to profit off of Prawn weapon technology which is advanced to our own.

The core problem with the movie is that we are being asked to cheer for a hero who is little more than a cliché, in fact, there are no human characters of any depth in this movie. Even the bug-hunt “Starship Troopers” had characters with, um, layers. The Prawns are perhaps a diverse group, some are more uncooperative and belligerent than others, with varying degrees of intelligence, but we never know what they aspired to before they crash-landed on Earth and so all we know is that they eat rubber and cat food, and are occasionally gullible with warlord extortionists. The most clever aspect of the movie is the exploitative relationship between South African warlords and the Prawns who get routinely swindled on transactions.

As a mockumentary style, the camerawork is more steady and less herky-jerky than “Cloverfield” but I at least got caught up in that film with its characters, and had general a sense of fear for people on the screen. You can’t fear for any humans in “District 9” when they are cut-and-dry clichés. Then there are gaps of logic which I can’t begin to go into in detail without spoiling it, but if you can just consider this: Why do bands of two set out to accomplish goals of rebellion or goals of flight when it would be assumed that bands of hundreds together could succeed even better?

I didn’t care about what happened at the end of “District 9” but I was at least curious of what could happen in “District 10.” But that’s another story writer-director Neill Blomkamp would rather not get into. He’s too busy trying to ape Michael Bay in the third act.