Premise Problem With District 9

In retrospect, the most basic premise of District 9 falls flat with an audible thud.

Quasi-governmental corporate thugs will do anything for the big bucks.  They want extraterrestrial weapon technology to sell to the highest bidder.  Billions and billions of dollars. They want it so bad that the Big Boss will sacrifice his son-in-law to get it, breaking his daughter's heart, even to the point of having him vivisected to death.

That's pretty greedy, if you ask me.

So how do they try to get these extraterrestrials to cooperate?  They put them in shacks in a concentration camp.  The aliens are reduced to the criminal mindset that we are told must inevitably come to those who live in shacks.  They become greedy opportunists themselves, who will do almost anything for .. cat food.  It seems that a local native crime lord (and why did the evil corporation let him into the District 9 camp?) has a larger collection of alien technology than the evil corporate thugs, because he knows a secret that hasn't occurred to the corporate thugs: bribe them with the thing everybody knows they like: cat food!!!! 

These aliens may be refugees, but they are not sheepherders (or zeepherders or whatever) from planet X.  Many of them are engineers with knowledge of the very technology the baddies want.  Christopher Johnson (the alien who is a quasi-protagonist in the film) never is conflicted about turning over his alien technology, because he is never offered anything for it.

What corporation wouldn't wine and dine our extraterrestrial guests (even if keeping them prisoner, prisoners can still be treated like guests) for such a huge pay off?  What government wouldn't do that, for that matter?

Comparing Elysium to District 9

Spoilers abound here for Blomkamp's two sci-fi action flicks.

I'm not planning here to compare the quality of the two movies, just highlight their plot similarities.

Both movies feature a disadvantaged group living in slums, a state that seems to be attributed to the avarice of corporations. Both feature a protagonist that has some health emergency that they have only days to resolve.  In both movies, the ailing protagonist is attempting to get to a space station in the sky that contains healing machines that can cure his ailment.  He must in the mean time hide from evil mercenaries because he has something in his body that the bad guys desperately want to exploit.  He must at some point escape from a torture table/chair because of this.  He will hide from the bad guys' surveillance in the slums for a while.  He will at some point be battling the bad guys using a powerful exo-suit, a reluctant hero turned Rambo.  He will have acquired the exo-suit from some crime lord in the slums.  He will at first be very selfishly motivated to only care about his ailment, but in time he will come around to deny himself access to that healing machine in the sky in a selfless act which will right some social injustice, since "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

A lot of similarities, I think.