I saw District 9 yesterday. It was one part Childhood’s End (as in the novel by Arthur C. Clarke), one part E.T., and one part Black Hawk Down. With its Joburg setting and everything else, I was afraid that the film would descend into a tedious lecture about the badness of apartheid. Instead, it descended into Transformers. Oh, it was good fun and all. But it took a provocative and compelling concept — how would the world deal with an ugly population of alien refugees of limited intelligence? — and then decided to become a chase movie in which the villains are (yawn) defense contractors.