When he was sitting in the Nigerian gang's lair, after the mech thing had killed all of the Nigerians, he showed it his claw and it clearly opened up so he could hop in. Instead, he sits there and moans and cries for another 5 minutes until he puts two and two together. After that, he has more firepower than a destroyer, but instead shoots like three people and runs for crashed command module, all the while taking damage from the dozens of mercenaries surrounding him (why did the Barrett hurt so much when the other guns did not? It's a 50 cal, but it's not that different then everything else they were shooting). It's not like these are nice guys, they tried to cut him up alive and harvest his body parts, and he'd already killed a bunch of them. Why not actually use to bad *** mechanical body suit, kill them all, and calmly stroll to the wrecked ship?
Also, why did he hit the smart alien and knock him unconscious? Yeah, it sucks that it's going to take three years to get yourself turned back into a human, but it's better than never. Just because you're angry doesn't mean that you should destroy your one chance of returning to normalcy. After clearly demonstrated below average intelligence (which was at least alluded to in the movie), why did he suddenly decide that he could operate the command module and the various devices on the mother ship that could make him human again?
Furthermore, I thought his character was particularly poorly drawn. He wasn't likable in the slightest bit, and was hardly believable. His change of heart was predictable, yet poorly contrived. Why did the grunt wait just long enough for Wikus to change his mind before killing the smart alien? Convenient at best.
Lastly, nearly every fight in the movie followed both the principle of evil marksmanship (that bad guys are always terrible shots, despite apparently being elite soldiers), and the one-at-time attack rule (bad guys never attack in groups, and instead wait patiently for their evil teammates to be defeated before attacking the hero). This is common for the genre, so it's not that big of a deal, but I was hoping for more.
All of those things wouldn't have been a big deal, except for the fact that the writers/director were trying to do something different. A fresh idea, so to speak. As such, it had a lot of potential. But, if you're going to go to all the trouble of being new and different, why fill the movie with antiquated, predictable plot devices that we've seen 1,000 times before? All that being said, I didn't hate the movie. It was okay, but I can't see a reason that it got such good reviews (8.4/10 on IMDB). I was totally okay with the end only being a partial resolution. I'm not bothered by movies without happy endings. I think the biggest downfall of the movie were the poorly drawn characters. You basically had two fleshed out main characters (Wikus, who's character wasn't very good, and the Smart Alien, who was decent), and a bunch of stock characters that did nothing for the movie.
