They're hideous beasts, the aliens who are stuck on Earth in the terrifically fresh and stomach-knotting "District 9," a sci-fi action corker produced by Peter Jackson and directed with snazzy flair by newcomer Neill Blomkamp.
Half-humanoid and half-insectile — rather like Jeff Goldblum when he metamorphoses into a bug in "The Fly" — the extraterrestrials walk upright with long, tapering limbs. Their bodies are crunchy exoskeletons with various moving parts, and their faces are slithering swarms of tentacles and antennae. They have powerful claws and speak their own exotic language, a riot of clicks and creaks.
 Courtesy photo: Sony Pictures
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Hideous, yes, but also tragically misunderstood.
And here they are, some 2 million of them, trapped in Johannesburg, South Africa, after their enormous mother ship conked out mid-air more than 20 years ago. Realizing the aliens, or "prawns" as they're derogatorily called, won't be leaving, the humans of Johannesburg have blocked them in a militarized zone, District 9, which has festered into a cesspool of crime, squalor and poverty.
The massive slum houses interspecies prostitution, gang wars and a lively (and very peculiar) black market. The prawns are worse than third-class citizens; they're unwanted dregs with few rights and zero respect. The humans just want them to go away.
The similarities to South African apartheid are loud and clear and painful. It's a simple, even obvious, metaphor, one that Blomkamp never belabors yet still kneads for a deeply sympathetic allegory about bigotry and intolerance and false detainment, and one that some might find similarities with at Guantanamo Bay.
Its allegorical power gives "District 9" its science-fiction bona fides. Laced with vigorous ideas and strong emotions, the movie becomes an action spectacle with meaning and resonance. After you flinch at the pervasive gore, you might even shed a tear.
Sharlto Copley — a skittish bundle of nerves and faux bravado, and extremely likable — plays the guy who gets infected by the prawns' DNA, meaning he starts to slowly turn into one of them. Instead of helping him, the venal corporation he works for wants to use him for experimentation. He runs and becomes the most hunted person in the world.
It's when he teams with the prawns that "District 9" reveals its big, beating heart and skills at welding "Starship Troopers"-like viscerality to a pathos-filled human story about loyalty and equality.
The movie is shot through with despair and fraught with panic, but it's also a lot of fun. It's fueled by Jackson's sense of velocity, action detail and fondness for messy violence. Blomkamp keeps you in the thick of it with a washed-out, hand-held, documentary look that recalls sci-fi thrillers "Cloverfield" and "28 Days Later."
There's optimism here, but it's shaded by pessimism, so that when you ask the sad, underlying question, "Can we all get along?," the movie can't quite deliver the answer we might like to hear.
