District 9 movie overview

ET go home – and take your twinkling cathedral of a mothership with you. That's the unfortunate attitude of embattled homo sapiens in this entertaining, technically superb if faintly unsatisfying futuristic thriller from the first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp; the producer is that Jedi master of creature features, Peter Jackson. The DNA of action-sci-fi merges with a sleek exo-skeleton of satire to create a smart dystopian movie, excitingly shot in a docu-realist style with some stunningly real CGI work. It's a film in the tradition of Planet of the Apes and Godzilla, with hints of serious pictures such as Children of Men and the less serious Cloverfield. And despite all the ultra-hi-tech sheen, the spirit of Ed Wood Jr lives cheerfully on in some of the prosthetic work.

Not too far into the future, a huge, lumbering spaceship shows up over planet Earth and stops there in the sky, hovering over a 21st-century modern city, and the digital image of that great rusty hulk up in the smoggy heat haze is so gobsmackingly real I suspected Blomkamp must have somehow built a spaceship and flown it up there himself. Terrified and suspicious, our earthling military finally storm the ship to find thousands of crustacean-like alien refugees cowering in the dark, metallic hold, evidently rejected by their home planet. Progressive liberal politicians have no choice but to allow these poor creatures out and let them live in the outskirts of the city, which they turn into a no-go crime slum called District 9.

They are nicknamed "prawns", hated by civilians, police and army. Eventually a smarmy civil servant, played by Sharlto Copley, is tasked with overseeing the mass eviction of the rabid untermensch-aliens, backed by the privatised corporate security militia, and moving them into a huge internment camp outside of town. But a fragment of something appears to have fallen from the still-hovering mothership into this unpoliced swamp, matériel that will allow the aliens secretly to rebuild and extend a cache of biotech weaponry, designed to work only in contact with alien flesh. Clearly, some of these prawns are planning something.

The city in question is the director's hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa, a location that simultaneously enables and renders very self-conscious the movie's satirical dimension. Only a few years after apartheid was abolished in South Africa … well, there they go, you see, bringing it in all over again, criminalising and dehumanising an entire populace with a Soweto-like township and petty discrimination in public parks, restaurants, everything. But just as no one in EastEnders watches EastEnders, no one notices the apartheid parallel here and gasps: "Hah ah-roneeck!"

This overt satire effectively encourages the audience to ask questions the movie is uninterested in answering. Do the aliens unite white and black earthlings in an ironic common front of caste-paranoia? And given that the ANC is in charge in 2009 and that its importance could reasonably be expected to last into the future being imagined here, are we to see black politicians prosecuting this grotesque new discrimination? Not exactly. In this movie, evil whites are in charge, albeit as officers of the all-powerful corporation – and such corporations are often introduced in dystopian sci-fi in a way that sneakily permits the film-maker to avoid getting tangled up in recognisable political realities.

I wasn't sure if Blomkamp is saying that white racism will always recur, or if he is just falling back on stereotypes. Earthling race-politics do not appear to exist, and the only important black character in this movie is a Nigerian crime-lord with cannibal tendencies: yet the whites, presiding over their alien experimentation labs, are as bad, or worse. Finally, I felt the movie's satirical status was a little too easily assumed: basically it's a third-person-shooter-game-cum-action-fantasy, and there are also some pretty heavy-handed plot inventions intended to breed sequels.

But what an action picture it is: the digital effects are so great they make it look like a documentary from hell, and Copley's performance as Wikus van de Merwe, the functionary who must supervise the slum clearance, is tremendous – particularly when he gets up close and personal with the alien prawns, a fatal transgression that is to trigger horrible changes in his own body.  The sequences showing his impossibly dangerous sortie into the slum, which he carries off with a bizarre nonchalance indicating that he simply doesn't understand the danger, are hugely tense with some grisly moments. Wikus opens up a shack to show how the alien tenants have killed a cow and are using the blood draining from its carcase to nourish the females' recently laid eggs. The heat and discomfort and fear of these scenes are outstandingly contrived, and Wikus's relationship with the alien insurgent, morphing from suspicion into something like brotherly love, is an effect that owes nothing to CGI.