Well, the original idea was about a monster that would destroy civilization. It's scaled back quite a lot from that original idea when I had to come up with how the monster came to be, why it was so angry at this society, and all the details inbetween. Over time, I came up with the idea of the top five scientists in this corrupt city getting permission from the government to do an experiment to see if they could download their intelligence into a machine, so their experiments could go on after they died. They build the machine, turn it on, and let it run its course. It all goes perfectly, except when they check the machine, none of the data has actually made it into the hardware. Confused, they open the machine up to find that a rat had chewed on the wires, and its body now lay at the bottom. The scientist instructed to throw away the body, Dr. Casius, picks up the rat (with gloves, of course), and as he's carrying it out, he feels a heartbeat. Scientific curiosity gets the better of him, and he brings it home and puts it in a cage. When he wakes up in the morning, to his horror, he finds that the rat has grown to three feet tall, broke the cage, and is now scurrying all over his basement. Over the course of the next few weeks, Dr. Casius can see the rat out of the corner of his eye staring at him, like it's studying him or something, and sometimes even mimicking his moves. Dr. Casius did try to get rid of the rat, but there's no way you're getting close to that thing, so it didn't work. Eventually, the rat even begins to mumble to itself, and before long, Dr. Casius is able to hear it speak little phrases. The prologue pretty much ends there, and the story picks up almost a year after the incident, where the rat, nicknamed Whiskers by Dr. Casius, has grown into his new intelligence a lot more, and is actually very similar to a human teenager. Whiskers, having five of the brightest minds of a generation downloaded into his brain, is very intelligent and has some great ideas for new technologies. That comes in handy when Whiskers is eventually found out, and Dr. Casius is pleading with the government not to kill Whiskers, but to give him a chance. Whiskers' intelligence is pretty much why the government decided to let him in the society, but they're keeping a close watch.
I came up with the rat because it made the most sense. One of my good friends, the art mod here Fairy, actually drew Whiskers for me so I could get a better idea of what he looked like. Here's the link because she did an amazing job, haha:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/209016427/Whiskers%20Drawing.png
District 9 is my second favorite movie and the reason I started writing in the first place, so it will always hold a special place in my heart, as cheesy as that sounds.
Well, I feel like we have a similar problem. I mean, I have to show just how foreboding and intrusive the government is, and how it affects the lives of every day people with just one, not so every day, character. I would recommend having them run into characters that display the things you feel like are missing. I'm still not quite getting what you're missing, however, so maybe elaborate a little more?