District 9

For many science fiction fans and videogamers, filmmaker Neill Blomkamp will be a familiar name as the-guy-who-almost-directed the Halo feature film. When that project faltered, he stuck with the genre to develop District 9, backed by producer Peter Jackson. Eschewing videogame source material, District 9 instead expands on ideas from an earlier short film Blomkamp had made Alive In Joburg (2005).

SF social parable District 9, which is co-scipted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, is highly impressive for a low-budget endeavour conceived in the rubble of a cancelled mega-budget project. Although the influence of Jackson - a man whose own first feature, Bad Taste, was a low-budget yarn about aliens on Earth - is apparent, Blomkamp himself has a distinctive voice. Blomkamp seems pretty obsessed with junk versus hi-tech; organic (frequently pretty gross) blended with non-organic (robots, exo-suits); and integration of real footage with faux vérité techniques to create collages of news clips, surveillance imagery and handheld footage. All these devices are apparent in 'Alive In Joburg', the "prototype" footage shot for Halo, and even his adverts for Nike and Citroën - most famously his pre-Transformers dancing Citroën C4. They reach their apogee in District 9.

The film starts with an image familiar from many science fiction films: aliens arriving, and a giant saucer taking up position over a city. It's not an invasion though: these are intergalactic refugees. And the aliens don't arrive in Manhattan or Chicago, they arrive in Johannesburg. Using new footage and vox pops, Blomkamp fills in 20 years of history: the arthropod aliens, derogatively dubbed "prawns", are like worker ants, leaderless and not too smart. They scavenge, they trade with gangsters, tensions rise, riots erupt. Cut to the present day and a corporation, the lamely named Multi-National United, has been charged with clearing out the aliens' filthy shanty township, District 9.

Being an evil corporation, MNU has a secret agenda: namely to exploit the alien technology, specifically weapons. Wikus Van Der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a member of the MNU middle-management, is promoted to leading the township clear-out. While searching a shack he has an accident with an alien object and gets infected. Somehow, his DNA starts changing, and when MNU want to vivisect him, he's forced to go on the run, hiding out in District 9 and forming an uneasy alliance with one atypically smart prawn, Christopher (Jason Cope).

District 9 plays out like Alien Nation meets The Fly, but given a serious shot of originality by Blomkamp, whose vérité techniques in particular provide a sense of gritty, grubby realism. Certainly, there's allegorical commentary on apartheid in particular, and segregation and racism in general, but as the film progresses it drifts into more straightforward action movie territory, and culminates with a huge shoot-out.

There are echoes of what Blomkamp might have done with a Halo movie here as alien weapons spit plasma, exo-armour blasts its way through massed foes, and drop-ships take to the skies. It's pretty cool, actually. But alongside the wham-bang, Blomkamp doesn't lose sight of a human, or human-prawn, story as the Wikus, affectingly played by Copley, undergoes a transformation, and forms an emotive bond with Christopher.

Although other filmmakers - from George A Romero to Cloverfield's Matt Reeves - have used vérité techniques, Blomkamp achieves fresh, dynamic results with his novel twist on the alien invasion narrative.