District 9

Drew's Thoughts:
The premise of South African summer sci-fi flick District 9 is an interesting one. At some point during the 80s an alien spacecraft essentially "breaks down" over Johannesburg. Long story short, the South African government and society treat the aliens as "illegal aliens" (a-ha moment everyone?) and set up a hooverville to "temporarily" place them in called District 9. The film is shot in a faux-documentary-style about the best it's ever been done, using scholars and news broadcasts to explain the history of District 9 and all the various social issues of the slum over the past 30 years. Once you get past the rich back story, it turns out what is currently happening is a lot less interesting.
It is difficult to pinpoint why I didn't care for this movie. Maybe there's just an inherent problem in telling a fictional story like a documentary (though a number of Christopher Guest movies can prove that wrong), maybe it's the lead's cartoonish performance, and that he amounts to being the only non-peripheral character in the film, maybe it's because the aliens look kinda fake. Maybe it's all those things. The lack of character-development is a big problem, and I'd also say, despite the good premise, the story is pretty thin.
The main dude played by Sharlto Copley gets alien fuel spit in his face which starts turning him into an alien so he goes on the search with other aliens to find more fuel so he can be human again and the aliens can leave (because that's all they've been wanting to do the whole damn time, but they're out of gas apparently). Here the documentary style really does not work, things don't really make all that much sense and the fake "shaky" camera just gets to be really bothersome rather than effective.
I would've been into some kind of "help the aliens escape" action movie, that might be fun, but you are only given one character, and he's a sucky character who I didn't care a stitch about, so the whole movie turns out be a big bore after such an interesting start.
It's pretty rare I ever encourage remakes, but if a more talented filmmaker were to take this premise I could see a cool movie there.