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District 9 is easily one of the best and most surprising films of the summer, an edge-of-your-seat actioneer that represents the very best that science fiction has to offer—thought-provoking commentary and spine-tingling entertainment.

Twenty years ago, a massive alien spacecraft came to hover over the South African city of Johannesburg. Humanity braced themselves for an attack that never came. After weeks of no contact, a team of military personnel and scientists boarded the craft and found the crew—which resembled large, bipedal crustaceans and were quickly dubbed “prawns”—incapacitated and starving to death. The prawns became refugees on earth and were set up in a sprawling makeshift camp known as District 9.

As the years passed and the world’s governments argued about how the refugee situation should be handled, conditions between the humans and the prawns deteriorated. The South African government decided that the best way to handle the alien population, now numbering in the millions, was to isolate them within District 9, now little more than a ghetto slum. Oversight of District 9 was handed over to the Multi-National United (MNU), a contractor ambivalent about the prawns’ physical welfare, but intensely interested in their weaponry. If the MNU could decipher how to operate the armaments (they require the contribution of alien DNA), they stand to reap tremendous profits.

Tension between the two races comes to a head when MNU decides to forcibly relocate the prawns to another concentration camp further outside the city and away from the human population. Things get further complicated when MNU field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is infected with an alien virus that begins rewriting his DNA, slowly transforming his cells from human to alien. Overnight, the mild-mannered bureaucrat becomes the most hunted—and important—man in the world. He alone is the bridge between the two species and he alone holds the key to decoding the alien technology. Ostracized and in danger of becoming a dissected lab specimen, Wikus hides out in the only place left for him: District 9.

First time feature film director Neill Blomkamp has made a blisteringly creative debut, a visually and psychologically arresting piece of cinema that completely lives up to its hype. His decision to present his film as if we were examining footage collected by a documentary film crew (complete with talking heads and 24-hour-news soundbites), grounds the film with a meta-realism otherwise unattainable. It is astonishing then that this framing device does not collapse later under the weight of the film’s special effects-laden climax. On the contrary, it endows the film’s more outlandish and far-out elements with immediate and almost unquestioned legitimacy.

District 9 was not supposed to be Blomkamp’s freshman film. Producer Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson) hired him to helm a movie adaptation of the wildly popular video game, Halo, after seeing several of the young South African director’s shorts. Halo went into pre-production only to be axed a few months later when the studio grew uncomfortable with the sky-high budget. Jackson was still interested in Blomkamp’s contribution and encouraged him to adapt one of his shorts, Alive in Jo’burg, into a full-length script. The final result was District 9.

District 9 is what good sci-fi is all about, a successful marriage of both brains and brawn. Doubtless, depending on which camp you find yourself in, you will want more of one or the other, especially during the film’s testosterone-infused third act. But District 9 does a marvelous job of giving us both sensibilities and then seams them together with unexpected ease. The film belongs to the sci-fi of ideas—a fascinating metaphor for xenophobia, apartheid and multinational greed—as well as a fanboy fantasy complete with video game choreography and, ironically, enough Halo-specific elements—gun barrel cams and a cornucopia of advanced weaponry—that surely a studio head somewhere is reconsidering his earlier decision.

District 9 employs some of the finest computer-generated imagery I’ve ever seen. The prawns, seen most often outdoors under the harsh African sun, are rendered with jaw-dropping realism. I cannot recall a single image or sequence that violated this extraordinary accomplishment. You forget very early on that half of what you’re seeing isn’t really there. But good as the CGI is, it is never allowed to get in the way of story or character development. Copley, an extremely talented non-actor and best friend of the director, brings to Wikus a nerdy everyman quality (so much so that when we first meet him we don’t assume for a moment that he is the film’s main character), even as we are forced to acknowledge that he is, in many ways, an unsympathetic hero, a regrettable product of his time and place. Wikus has an interest in but not any empathy for the aliens he manages. He, like everyone else in the film, refers to them with the derogatory moniker “prawns” and sees them not as equals, but as something animalistic and infantile. Only when Wikus is infected and forced to live among the alien population does the story suddenly take on a very personal, very human resonance and Wikus comes face to face with his own prejudiced assumptions.

Fusing B-movie tropes with gory body horror touchstones and a surprisingly miniscule budget with no name actors and a dark-side-of-the-moon setting, the fresh and original District 9 delivers chills and thrills in equal measure. And while it gives us a viscerally satisfying ending, leaving us panting for more (the end is as big of a sequel setup as you can get), what sticks with you long after you’ve left the theater is humanity’s fundamental inhumanity. We are told little to nothing about who the aliens are or where they come from. Why? Because District 9 is not about aliens, it is about human beings. The most shockingly realistic thing about District 9 is not its documentary style or its photo-realistic special effects; it’s the overwhelming feeling that if a first contact encounter ever took place in real life, this is probably a fairly accurate depiction of how things would go down. Why all the alien invasion movies with malevolent extraterrestrials decimating human populations, District 9 seems to ask, when, if our own history is any indication, humans beings are the true monsters?

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.