Chris Barsanti

Not as smart as it wants to be but much cleverer than it could have been, District 9 is a kind of gross-out laboratory of sociologically-minded science fiction tropes updated for the post-Cloverfield generation. A first-contact scenario that eschews angelic choirs and glowing wonder for muddy corruption, the film threads enough thoughtful commentary into its whirligig media-fractured action plot to mostly make up for its lapses into cliché…