In the docu-style, sci-fi thriller District 9, hundreds of thousands of aliens become stranded in South Africa after their massive spaceship comes to a standstill above downtown Johannesburg.
Unable to fix the craft, this massive population of tentacle-waving, exoskeleton-sheathed aliens eventually outstays its welcome; they become reviled by humans for burdening the country's welfare system even though all they really want to do is go home.
Corralled into District 9 - a rubbish-strewn refugee camp that calls to mind Mumbai's septic squalor, captured to striking effect in Slumdog Millionaire - they are segregated from the general populace by barbed wire.
There, the film's sentient yet excitable aliens are denied such basic necessities as running water and are denigrated by native earthlings as "prawns" for their resemblance to Sasquatch-sized shellfish.
Arriving as one of the hottest properties at San Diego's recent Comic-Con, the movie wowed its fanboy premiere audience and set the TweetDeck alight with reports that District 9 is the real deal: one of the most original sci-fi films to come along in years.
Given the film's real-life setting amid Soweto's teeming townships and its segregationist signage - "For humans only! Non-humans banned!" read placards in the movie - it's impossible not to correlate the aliens' predicament with recent South African history.
And that's no accident. Call District 9 the world's first autobiographical alien apartheid movie.
Writer-director Neill Blomkamp grew up in Johannesburg during an era of white minority rule; later, memories of the apartheid government's social divisiveness and authoritarian control became "the most powerful influence" in shaping his creative vision.
"It all had a huge impact on me: the white government and the paramilitary police - the oppressive, iron-fisted military environment," Blomkamp said over breakfast recently.
"Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go.
"Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9."
It should boggle the imagination of anyone who sees the movie to discover, then, that for all its narrative assuredness and engrossing neo-realism, District 9 is the debut feature of a director who has not yet reached the age of 30.
Moreover, despite showcasing more than 600 computer-enhanced shots of bizarre aliens, high-tech weaponry and crazy spaceship blastoffs - much of it shot in cinema verite-style that one-ups last year's Cloverfield - Blomkamp (29) managed to shoot District 9 on a relatively modest $US30 million budget.
Those merits aside, Sony's decision to roll out the film in the midst of the northern hemisphere summer's ultracompetitive movie line-up boils down to three words attached to District 9: "Peter Jackson presents."
Jackson, the Oscar-winning writer-director behind the blockbuster Lord of the Rings franchise, was key in actualising Blomkamp's vision for District 9, producing the film, arranging its independent financing and helping Blomkamp iron out kinks in the script.
"He saw South African society - both the good and bad of the society there - and he wanted to put a science fiction spin on what he witnessed growing up because he's a science fiction geek," said Jackson, who had travelled from New Zealand to Comic-Con primarily to sing Blomkamp's praises.
"I really like the idea that here was a guy who was making a movie based on life experience, not just on some movie that he was a fan of. District 9 is not reflective of any movie that I can imagine. It's really very original, which I love about it, and that's totally Neill."
But before there was a District 9, Blomkamp was attached to Halo, a planned $145 million movie adaptation of the popular space age shoot-'em-up video game of the same name.
In 2005, Jackson signed on to write the script for what would have been a joint production between 20th Century Fox and Universal, also serving as its producer with the intention of hiring "someone young and new" to direct.
Universal's production chief at that time, Mary Parent, was in charge of vetting film-makers for the project and presented Blomkamp's show reel to Jackson.
It included a six-minute short film, Alive in Joburg - a mockumentary depicting space alien refugees living in segregation in a South African township.
Blomkamp landed the job and pulled up stakes from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, to move to New Zealand and set to work at Jackson's production facility, Weta Workshop.
"He was just what we were after," Jackson said, "one of these guys who lives and breathes film."
The Halo assignment represented the culmination of more than a decade of work for Blomkamp, who heeded his professional calling at an age when most kids are still breaking-in baseball mitts.
"When I was 14 or 15, I got into 3-D animation on the computer my parents bought me," he said.
"I was toying with practical effects. Prosthetics and in-camera effects. Models and photography. I knew I wanted to be involved in all that."
His family relocated to Vancouver when Blomkamp was 18. He enrolled in Vancouver Film School.
And after working as an effects artist for a production company and shooting music videos for local bands, he moved into directing TV commercials.
Blomkamp continued to shoot special-effects-heavy short films during his off-hours, though, funnelling about 40% of his yearly earnings towards paying for them.
And after being featured at the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase in Cannes in 2004, he decided to break into Hollywood, resulting almost immediately in a fortuitous business union: Blomkamp landed one of Hollywood's pre-eminent deal-makers, agent Ari Emanuel, to represent him.
But after months of preproduction on Halo, the project fell apart.
"I don't know the specifics - it was Universal and Fox duking it out," Blomkamp said.
Blomkamp was ready to go home in defeat when a brief conversation with Jackson's partner and frequent collaborator, Fran Walsh, changed the course of his career.
Her suggestion to him: "Why don't you stay and work on something with a sci-fi twist? Something that represents you."
"She had the idea to turn Alive in Joburg into a feature," recalled Blomkamp.
"I was like, `That's awesome!'."
Jackson seized on the idea of putting together a "true independent film" financed outside the studio system.
"The very next day, all the artists switched from Halo to District 9, which we didn't have a name for at that stage," Jackson said.
"We basically supported Neill. We didn't have a studio involved so we funded the development of the movie ourselves."
With his writing partner Terri Tatchell, Blomkamp began drafting the screenplay in 2007.
He kept costs down, in part, by casting his childhood friend and frequent collaborator Sharlto Copley - a writer-director-producer with limited experience in front of the camera - in the film's lead role.
He portrays Wikus van der Merwe, a bumbling field operative for MNU, a giant corporate conglomerate that wants to relocate the aliens from their shanties to a newly built extraterrestrial ghetto.
When the character accidentally contaminates himself with a mysterious alien biological fluid during an MNU sweep, his life unravels and his allegiances shift.
As such, Wikus finds himself an unlikely catalyst for non-human revolt.
But in mid-2008, as filming commenced in one of Soweto's poorest neighbourhoods, reality intervened.
"As we started shooting, we woke up to smoke on the horizon with army choppers," Blomkamp said.
"South African groups had started to lynch and burn and machete these other groups. Mass murder was happening within a few kilometres of us!"
A decade of animosity between Zimbabwean refugees and impoverished South African blacks had boiled over into rioting, Blomkamp noted, at the moment his movie partially inspired by the same phenomenon, what he terms "black on black xenophobia," was finally taking form.
"We were making a film about the most serious topic in southern Africa, but it was a satirical film," he said.
"Obviously, we were afraid. I felt like I was stomping around like some unco-ordinated, goofy, first-time film-maker wrestling with a topic that was now highly, highly serious."
Copley, who has known Blomkamp since the director was 14, says Blomkamp stayed cool while the pressure ratcheted up around him.
He channelled that heightened sense of consequence into what appears on the screen in District 9.
"He flows with things more than anybody I have worked with and gets what he needs out of a situation," Copley said.
"It's really something to see. Here's a guy who has an incredible artist head space. And he's following his emotions into it."
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Times staff writer Gina McIntyre contributed to this report.
