Once in a while a good independent film gets picked up and tucked under the arm of a name producer or other Hollywood mogul and gets noticed. This one got its day in the sun because it was produced by Peter Jackson. Thanks to King Kong and The Lord of the Rings, everyone notices his other projects. If he’s involved, it must be a masterpiece. District 9 has therefore been trumpeted as his next great opus and the movie to top Hollywood’s blockbuster summer. But to tell the truth, the latter isn’t hard to achieve. Being better than the messy Transformers sequel, which left its own cast wondering what it was about, isn’t worth much.

What we have here is a very good movie that shows promise, and it’s a solid debut for director Neill Blomkamp. The idea of aliens and humans working together isn’t really new, but it’s seldom been treated so sympathetically. The scene is also fresh. An alien mother ship appears not over New York, London, or any of the usual cities but over Johannesburg, South Africa. For a long time the ship does nothing, but military forces finally break in and find thousands of aliens barely alive. Being humans, they do the humane thing by feeding the travelers. But remaining cautious, they place them in concentration camps. The main location is called District 9, but they’re soon relocated to a more secure camp farther from town, and field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is put in charge of the operation.

Perhaps thanks to his moustache, but also because of his mannerisms, Copley reminded me a great deal of Peter Sellers. He bumbles along with good cheer, evicting aliens with glee and little understanding, until he accidentally ingests some alien material and starts to grow a claw in place of his hand. Certain government forces are delighted, as they’ve been seeking a way to study the alien weapons, which are so organic to the aliens that humans can’t fire them. As he becomes increasingly like the aliens, dubbed prawns because they resemble lobsters or shrimp, van der Merwe looks like the answer to all of their questions. But when he befriends the most intelligent of the prawns, he becomes an alien ally pursued by his fellow humans.

The film starts intelligently, but there are problems with its second half, which degenerates into typical bad-guys-chasing-good-guys situations. That said, the parallels to South African apartheid are well drawn. District 9 recalls Cape Town’s historic District 6, and the alien language uses clicking sounds that mimic the clicks found in the Khoisan languages of South Africa.

The movie starts as a mockumentary, with dubious, washed-out video quality and shaky, handheld cameras. It then shifts to filmed scenes that have the same low video quality. The special effects are all over the map: the CGI alien ship looks completely fake, while the prawns are very well done. But because there’s no reality to measure the abnormal against, it all looks like green-screen fakery. Had it been shot completely in documentary style, there would be an excuse, but it wasn’t.

Copley is simply wonderful as van der Merwe in a solid and auspicious film debut. I wouldn’t be surprised to see his name among the year’s award nominations. And though they were a combination of CGI and voice recording, I was also impressed at how well the alien scientist and his son were characterized. Overall, the aliens displayed qualities that made them seem human at times.

District 9 is an interesting film that starts as unusually intelligent science fiction but devolves into space opera along the way. It introduces us to Sharlto Copley, a stunning new actor whose career will be watched, and it ensures that Neill Blomkamp will have a second chance at making a feature film.

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