I liked District 9, but it's turning out to be one of those movies with more loose threads the closer you look at it.
- If the Prawn have such awesome weapons, why do they let themselves get pushed around for twenty years?
- Soooo... the spaceship is completely turned off, right? How the hell does it manage to keep hovering? Did the Prawns set cruise control and then forget how to turn the rest of the ship on?
- A great deal of the plot centers on the command module that broke off of the ship. The reasons the CM broke are never explored, but that's a fair thing to chalk up to coincidence. What ISN'T a reasonable coincidence is that the CM crashed in exactly the same area where District 9 is established. Pretty convenient, no?
- Along the same lines, it's a little weird that no one surveying that area for District 9 ever noticed some kind of impact crater from the ship's crash.
- It's implied that the fluid is only necessary to make the Command Module fly, not to turn on the computer. (The young Prawn is ordered to "initiate the start sequence" before the fluid is input, and it appears that the computer is active at that point.) This is significant because when the CM is grounded, the Young Prawn uses the on-board computer to turn on the Mothership remotely and activate a tractor beam. This begs the question - if the fluid isn't necessary to activate the computer, and it's possible to activate the tractor beam remotely, what do the aliens need the fluid for in the first place?
I enjoyed much of the film, don't get me wrong. On top of that, I'm delighted to see the audience embrace a movie that wasn't based on an 80's that was marketed as a cartoon show of questionable quality. Hopefully the success of District 9 will help usher in a trend of studios taking a chance on original ideas over optioning products based on familiar branding.
After all, that trend has to stop before Play-Doh: The Movie.
