District 9 Reviews
Top Critic
You don't feel bamboozled, fooled, or patronized by District 9, as you did by most of the summer blockbusters. You feel winded, shaken, and shamed.
Perhaps we're witnessing a new dawn for politically engaged sci-fi and horror, with Blomkamp as a latter-day George Romero. Either way, this is a stunningly impressive debut.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
To call this the best shrimp-from-outer-space South African apartheid allegory ever made does not begin to do it justice. But it's a start.
The backstory beats the hell out of the present-tense plot, a routine affair in which a well-meaning doofus working for the Man is infected with a virus, starts turning into an alien himself, and falls in with the oppressed creatures.
A bloody good time. One of the most original movies of the summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
In this summer of gargantuan mediocrities, a modestly budgeted project with an actual idea in its head, and the wiles to manifest it onscreen, exploding heads and all -- that's something.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A memorable, monstrous fable that's consistently gripping.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The movie falls into the same uneasy category as Eight Legged Freaks: too tongue-in-cheek to be thrilling, not funny enough to be a comedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The wildest science-fiction film to come out all year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
In a good summer, there's usually a movie that will come out of nowhere and completely wow us. This is a good summer, and that movie is District 9.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Every now and then, a film comes along that both defies and compels description.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The film all but gets away from [the director] as battles take over and opportunities to explore the story as more than the sum of its weapons disappears.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
You've seen alien invasion flicks before, and you've seen more than your share of summer blockbusters. But you've never seen anything quite like District 9.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
This might go down as the year that science-fiction cinema, despite the deafening crash and clangor of sparring robots, began to rediscover its brains, heart and soul.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
If you're looking for the late-summer special-effects action fantasy with big franchise potential, forget about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (You already forgot? Fine.) Instead, proceed directly to District 9.
District 9 succeeds brilliantly as an exercise in style, but the style promises a level of substance the film never quite delivers.
In a summer where toy robots and action heroes have rocked the box office and killed brain cells, it's nice to see a movie where some serious thought has been put into reviving a stale genre.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's a wonderfully sly, farcical verve to these early moments, but it dissipates when the script, with its strains of E.T. and The Fly, moves into high sci-fi gear.
District 9 proves that sci-fi thrillers don't have to be star-studded or mega-budgeted to be visually compelling and thoroughly entertaining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A sci-fi-fueled indictment of man's inhumanity to man -- and the non-human -- District 9 is all horribly familiar, and transfixing.
In the midst of it all you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing and the inventiveness of the special effects.
| Original Score: 4/5
This baby has the stuff to end the movie summer on a note of dazzle and distinction.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
What is absolutely impressive are the visual effects: the hordes of aliens, the mother ship, the seamless blending of the real with the fantastic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Socked in with the whiplash action and over-the-top gore is a story that's shockingly funny, clever and emotionally resonant. District 9 is that rarest kind of film, magnificent trash.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
In an ideal world, every Hollywood studio suit would be forced to sit through District 9 as part of a curriculum titled "How to Make a Summer Movie That Delivers."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's an outsider blockbuster, a juicy, bravura piece of moviemaking pulp, and its hellacious style almost -- but not quite -- disguises its shortcomings as a story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a grimy, consistently surprising and fundamentally human-centric science-fiction yarn, reminiscent of the dystopian, semi-realistic 1970s tradition.
I, for one, hope the inhabitants of Earth never encounter visitors from another planet because the reality of how we might interact with them could be close to what is depicted here, and that's a depressing thought.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A great example of how fresh science fiction can be when it's not just handed over to the special effects team and then the marketing division. "District 9" is far from perfect, but every frame in it drips with ambition, energy and vision.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
District 9 does a lot of things right, including giving us aliens to remind us not everyone who comes in a spaceship need be angelic, octopod or stainless steel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
District 9 proves that there's intelligent alien life in the movie universe this summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
District 9 has too many gory vaporizations to qualify as a serious statement on race relations, but it does outclank Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen by a wide margin, and you thrill to the cleanly cut action sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
For science-fiction fans looking for a bit more brainpower than Transformers has to offer, District 9 points the way toward redemption for a movie genre that could use an infusion of artistic ambition.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
As straight sci-fi action, it packs a punch, once you get past the ick factor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
This is one intense, intelligent, well-crafted action movie - one that dazzles the eye with seamless special effects but also makes you think without preaching.
District 9 is the most exciting science fiction movie to come along in ages; definitely the most thrilling film of the summer; and quite possibly the best film I've seen all year.
Even in the movie's most conventional stretches, Blomkamp puts things across with terrific verve, using action and computer effects to enhance rather than trump story and character.
A genuinely original science fiction film that grabs you immediately, not letting go until the final shot.
This grossly engrossing speculative fiction bears Jackson's blood-splattered fingerprints but also heralds first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp as a nimble talent to watch.
