I think Spoony from the good'ol experiment had a pretty good opinion on it. (And thanks the magic of Copy+past, here it is)
Anyway, I remembered something else that would have been good to see in the documentary approach, and a very good reason the prawns would be met with widespread hostility: religion.
The presence of extraterrestrial life is heretical to many forms of organized religion, who believe that God created Man in His own image. There?s nothing in those books about God creating prawns on the seventh day, and knowledge of their existence would cause global theological disillusionment, sending hundreds of millions into a crisis of faith never before imagined. Some might reform their religious texts, be progressive about the whole thing, but by and large, the prawns? arrival is the death of God. No longer is Earth the favored planet, Man the chosen life form. Suddenly we?re shown to be inferior to a pack of bipedal roaches. You?d have mass suicides, wars, civil unrest manifesting in hate crime on an unprecedented scale. Millennial cults would spring up like weeds, fearing the appearance of these ?demonic-looking? creatures as a sure sign of the end-times.
Now that?d be a documentary.