Help Me Understand District 9

HEAVY SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

I feel like I'm missing something. In a summer that brought us such mid-numbing, popcorn crap like Wolverine, Terminator: Salvation, and Transformers 2 (all of which I turned my brain off an enjoyed), I can understand why District 9 rises above the crowd. Unlike most of the movies this summer, even Star Trek which rocked, District 9 had some real thought behind it. I can fully understand why people are swooning over it. But this movie was far from the best movie of the year. It's far from the best sci-fi movie of the last ten years, as some have said. Frankly, I thought it was just ok.

You can say I'm just overthinking it, but this list excludes all the nit-picky stuff like, "How can these clearly sea-creature-based aliens survive in our atmosphere?" That kind of stuff I don't think about, and even if I do, I brush it aside as leaps of logic necessary to tell a story. These are the things that truly bothered me about District 9:

1) Their attempts to make the messages about apartheid not so heavy handed resulted in a movie that makes no sense to anyone that knows anything about apartheid. It's not an allegory for apartheid because the situation is completely different. In reality, the blacks of South Africa were the native population and the whites came in and oppressed them. In the movie, the South African government took the aliens off their ship to help them, then eventually turned on them. I get that the aliens got out of control, but so soon after apartheid, there's no way the people of South Africa would react like this. Many of them still remember apartheid, and like how the Germans view the Holocaust, it would be such a pock on their collective psyche that they would never let this happen again so soon. In the original short film, which I just watched, it all takes place DURING apartheid, which actually makes sense.

2) The movie is not true to itself. At its core, District 9 is an action movie, as evidenced by the third act, which is all violence, no weight. As much as it's dressed up as a thinking man's action movie, it's just a regular action movie with a thin veil of thought. Not a single one of the major issues of the film gets resolved. The end of the movie focuses so much on the action, we never get a resolution on anything really. I'm all for ambiguity, but there's a difference between an ambiguous ending, and an ending that doesn't resolve anything.

3) The first act spends so much time with them handing out these eviction notices when they should have spent more time setting up the world. The aliens have been here 20 years, how did we get from welcoming them and saving them to oppressing them? Clearly, humans and aliens have the ability to communicate, how could we not, in 20 years time, teach them how to properly act on our planet? What did we try before the ghetto? Was this a last resort, or did one day we all just decide to throw them into District 9?

4) A list of loose plot threads and missed opportunities:

a- I was frankly pissed off that when Wikus stormed MNU, he didn't have the chance to confront the scientists that tortured him. These scientists just got to get away with being evil?

b- No one but Wikus sees how horrible District 9 is. Yeah, eventually, Wikus' buddy uncovers everything, but he could have done that whether Wikus turned into an alien or not, making the big resolution of the film not even remotely related to the story.

c- MNU's goals were far too shallow. Weapons? That's it? This is literally a multi-national corporation, and all they want from the aliens is to unlock their weapons technology? Why don't they have teams of scientists working with the aliens to go through the mother ship and learn the diverse technologies?

d- How did a ship with barely enough power manage to stay hovered over Johannesberg for 20 years?

e- How did their fuel turn Wikus into an alien? Do they all look the way they look because of exposure to this fuel? If this fuel has just been lying around for 20 years, why has no one else been exposed and transformed into an alien?

f- They tell us prawn is a derogatory term, but then never tell us what to actually call them. If prawn is derogatory, wouldn't it be like the n-word to them, and subsequently wouldn't the aliens react appropriately to being called prawn?

5) Could the aliens and humans communicate with each other or not? In the beginning, Wikus confronts Christopher with an eviction notice. Christopher actually reads it and points out the legal points of said contract. Wikus reacts like Christopher's just being difficult like the rest of them. He doesn't even acknowledge that this stupid alien has so quickly picked up on the fact that what they're doing's pretty illegal. That led me to believe Wikus didn't really understand their language. But then, once he teams up with Christopher, suddenly they're easily communicating. Writers, seriously, you can't just change the facts when they're convenient.

6) Why didn't the aliens, with their clearly superior weaponry, just rise up and demand better living conditions? Wikus, with his one gun, broke into MNU and took on a clearly well-trained military unit. I get that 20 years later, they've sold their guns for cat food, but how did they ever let themselves get subjugated. You can say they didn't rise up for fear or reprisal, but they clearly establish that the prawns are just the dregs of society, none of which really think globally, so why wouldn't they just grab a gun and demand the living conditions they want? Normally, this would be the sort of thing I'd just let go, but the weapons are such an important part of the story, I can't just ignore how they half-handled the issue of guns.

7) The violence was wholly unnecessary. Really, my main problem was the gun that made people explode. I'm all for deplorable violence, but if this is supposed to be a thinking man's action movie, why is the violence so explicit?

In conclusion, this is what I think happened. The ending of the movie was supposed to be that this ship was a test for the human race. These aliens send a ship full of refugees to a planet and see how the dominant species treats them. The ending was supposed to be another ship coming and telling everyone what assholes we are and warning that they're coming back to destory us. Then South Park did the exact same thing (with the pine-box derby racer episode) and they realized Matt Stone and Trey Parker stole their poignant ending. They couldn't come up with a more meaningful ending in time, so they cobbled together what we got.

Am I just completely off my dot here?