http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/...nest/145339059
http://zip.4chan.org/tv/res/4479802.html might vanish eventually

well....
the plot holes i saw were
1) you have 1million aliens on a huge floating spaceship that serves as the perfect place to hold them because they can't get off, and no humans without consent from the government can reach them. but nooo.. you stick them in the middle of a populated city seperated by... chain fences?

2) you take the aliens off the ship, but let them smuggle out huge mechs and 1meter long guns?

3) you have this supposedly multi billion dollar corporation managing this shantytown, and you let some crippled Nigerian stockpile huge caches of alien technology?

4) small arms technology is more important then interstellar space travel technology? wtf aren't there teams of researchers on the ship tearing it to pieces.

5) so, humans can understand prawn, and prawns can understand human and read. but none of them have asked each other. 'so.. where ya from? how's it going?' who flies your ship?

1) The ship was floating above the city for 3 months before anyone decided to do anything. While it may have seemed illogical for them to take them off the ship, ultimately the people in charge ultimately decided to. Part of their rationale to do this was due to the fact that we didn't know what they were doing or planning up there and the movie touches on humanity's intrinsic curiosity. This could be exemplified by people who received mysterious envelopes and opened them up only to receive an anthrax surprise a few years back.

Also perhaps the people in charge figured there would be some advantage to getting inside the mothership. Some would say instating the HST by Gordon Campbell is a bad decision but that doesn't change the fact that the decision was made by his govt. Likewise the decision to take them off the ship was motivated by a series of factors.

2) It was said in the movie that portions of the ship were falling off constantly throughout the 20 year timespan starting with the command ship. Its entirely possible that the armory section or some other cargo bay fell off the ship.

3) Like most slums and sketchy places around the world, when organized crime takes a footing usually the governing body gives them a wide berth. Just because a govt. has lots of money doesn't mean they know how to keep things under control effectively. The same slums exist in africa and while the warlords and organized crime there do not stock pile alien energy weapons, they definitely have access to many forms of weaponry currently available.

4) Its assumed that within the 20 years at some point the researchers were on the ship to attempt to obtain some of the technological secrets held by the aliens. However since all their tech was genetically encoded and it was believed that most of the "prawns" were of a worker class and not completely intelligent, all their research would have amounted to them realizing they cant do anything with whats on that ship or the weapons. Further still, since the aliens arrived decades earlier it would be assumed that most researching bodies have lost interest in the larger more complex issues, and were primarily focused on how to get the alien tech to work with humans. Namely genetic/bio research hence the vivisection/unit23-esque MNU labs.

5) The humans attempted communication with prawns hence how they learned their language, but over time the humans determined that the prawns were unintelligent and like mentioned before the worker caste of their species. Also in the newscasts and documentary sections the people who were interacting with the prawns believed that the leaders of their race or the primary controllers had somehow died off or abandoned the 1.7 million prawns. The alien christopher johnson was probably not a leader but was more intelligent and obviously chose to hide this fact for the most part from the humans.

I see you didn't pay enough attention in the movie.

1) Their were 1 million aliens 20 years later since their arrival. Based on the fact that have up to 50 babies at a time, we can predict their numbers were closer to 40,000 odd thousand on the ship. NOT 1 million to start.

2) We have no clue how they were evicted from the ship. They drilled into the ship, but we can predispose humans were not ready for initial hand to hand contact. They aliens may have used a beam to beam themselves down into district 9. This question though is unknown. Remember this is were the alien shipped landed. MNU might have felt it was easier to allow them to drop themselves out of the ship to the location underneath them, District 9. I believe humans had no idea of how to transport 40,000 Aliens as they were so foreign to them. Think of humans initial caution of contacting diseases etc etc. The chain fences were a simple way of alienating (no pun intended) them from humans.

3) Could it be that MNU did NOT want to provide food/money/resources to these aliens. They believed that because they knew weapons would not work without the aliens, it would be suitable for a black market economy to exist in which the aliens were fed food, in exchange for weapons unusable to the Nigerians. If at one point MNU found a way to use them, they could easily usurp the Nigerians with their billion dollar backing and soldiers and take control of their cache.

4) I do believe at the beginiing of the movie MNU decided they wanted to go into the ship to see what was in their. They found aliens, but we are not sure if they haven't as well tried to take technology from the ship. Were also not sure because of the health of the aliens, if MNU decided not to go farther into the ship, but rather leave a hole open for the Aliens to get out.

5) If you have seen Alive in Joburg or one of the trailers you would realize that the aliens were interrogated once they came into District 9. Their is a direct conversation in which an Aliens says all they want to do is go back home. We can predict that yes they had discussed home, who flies your ship, what is wrong with your ship etc. Remember the news reported that they theorized that a piece of the ship had come off causing it to not be able to fly. They must have studied the ship extensively and tried to gather as much info the Aliens would be willing to give up.

1) yeah you don't know what they were doing up there, but once they boarded the ship and realized ' oh shit there are things in here dying ' why would the 2nd reaction be ' hey guy's let's take them to the surface and have them mingle with the general population '. makes no rationale sense. introducing the prawns onto the surface would create so many more problems then simply sending them food and medical supplies. again, this leads up to the weakness of the plot.

2) and the humans with gps and helicopters, cannot beat a bunch of prawns on legs to the lewt?

3)okay, that's for humans though, humans have no intrinsic value to modern society, aliens with advanced technology do. why the hell would you allow stupid thugs to potentially gain a devastating weapon when you could *easily* just kill them. a simple wall, or maybe a 'authorized entry only' sign would help? I mean, the whole world probably give the South African government funding to contain and research the prawns. and i mean come on, prawns are strong enough to rip a human to pieces in seconds, yet the only thing seperating them from humans is.. a chain fence? most slums and sketchy parts of the world, do not have access to the worlds most advanced military technology, but a cripple from nigeria did.

4)so after only 20 years of attempting to study an object, all the reasearchers just packed it in and gave up? you got a huge ship that carries over 1 million inhabitants and the researchers run out of things to do?

5) so, the prawns are not capable of having memories? they cannot tell of their experiences leading UP to being stranded on earth? could they atleast say they were mining, or colonizing or wtf? poke and prod at they pysche?


the plot seems to rest on a series of convienant mistakes.

1) i'm pretty sure at the begining they said the ship itself housed over a million prawns to start. irregardless of the number of prawns originally there. so, going by your guess, 40 odd thousand to start. the government couldn't even keep under control 40,000 prawns? on a space ship, kilometers above the ground. instead, choose to bring them to the surface, use a chain fence to contain them, and allowed them to breed into over 1 million prawns in 20 years? wow, that seems like really really piss poor containment skills and population management.

2) pretty sure in the narration, they said the decison was made to remove the aliens from the ship onto the surface and create an enclosed area to house them.
3)why wouldn't the MNU want to feed them? would it not be easier to control their breeding habits and behavour if MNU fed them, instead of scummy gangsters that kill and eat prawns?? again, this rests on the idea that the prawns somehow smuggled out the weapons.
4) uh your number 4 answer doesn't answer my question on this question. why would MNU be more interested in small arms technology when interstellar space travel and other more lucrative and beneficial technology could be expropiated from the mothership.
5)oh, so trailers are considered part of the movies now? -_- yes, a large space ship drops from the sky, falls to the surface, and with GPS technology and topography, and the fact that it could probably hold very advanced technologies, humans simply can't find it. it was buried. in a shack, convientantly under district 9, BEFORE it was built.

1) Them taking the aliens off the ship was as a result of the govt's initial humanitarian effort. While it was implied that the contractors and corporation was mostly evil, there was obviously a lot of people who cared about the well being of the prawns even if they were alien. I'm sure once they found out they were starving on the ship, it could have been inferred that there was something causing them to die on the ship. Also simply shipping food up there would've probably been more difficult.

Touching on the evil corps, they obviously wanted the aliens out of there so they could do research and take the alien tech. But when it was determined after much studying that they couldn't do much with it most interest in the immediate technology waned.

2) They may have gps and helicopters, but obviously the alien tech doesnt have a beacon attached to it. In an area like the slums where everything is such a mess, it would be pretty easy to hide some alien tech. Afterall the command module ship was pretty big when it initially fell, but they couldn't find it all those years. It was implied in the movie that they looked for it a lot but couldn't find a thing. Of course one could say oh that's just what the movie is telling you, but get deep enough one could do that to any premise from any movie.

3) As mentioned in rslaters post, the alien weaponry was mostly useless since the researchers couldn't make and ends up or down about it as the tech was bioengineered to work only with the aliens. Hence, this would explain why the govt didn't swoop down and take all that stuff when it was mostly inoperable garbage. Also since most of the alien prawns were of a lower societal caste as in the worker class, they were evidenced to be much more compliant and gullible, albiet at times highly aggressive when their dwelling places were threatened. This was highlighted when the cripple african tricked on alien into staying behind to get chopped.

On the advanced weapons issue, even the warlords in north africa have fully automatic weaponry rocket propelled grenades and what not, it wouldnt be much of a stretch for them to obtain a bunch of weapons which are pretty much useless to human beings.

4) They didn't so much run out of things to do but instead refocused their efforts on genetics as that was what was preventing them from utilizing the advanced alien tech as I mentioned earlier.

5) The prawns have memories, but as evidenced in the movie, they aren't exactly on the best terms with humans. Why would you want to disclose your information to someone you view in a poor light. Just the same would a tribesman be inclined to tell some new authority about all his previous actions? Also with regards to your command ship issue, the ship probably had chris johnson in it, so when it dropped out, he couldve taken quick steps to make sure its hidden, then afterward built his shack on top of it. With the advanced alien tech, heck even a decent sized explosion wouldve made a quick enough hole for the ship to be buried.

FYI the sequel is already out on DVD!