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A low budget indie from South Africa produced by a New Zealander known for his high-budget antics, District 9 was the under-the-radar hit of 2009.

Now it’s arrived on Blu-ray, and it seems to have lost none of its off-beat charms along the way.

For the past 25 years a large spaceship has hovered ominously over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Arriving unheralded, in the first few months after the ship’s appearance the government simply watched and waited for something to happen, nervous of the idea of ‘first contact’ with an unknown alien species. Then they hacked their way in to the ship to discover a collection of malnourished, disease-ridden insect-like life forms huddled in fear deep within its bowels. These creatures were rounded up and placed in a large area on the borders of the city as the government of Johannesburg figured out what to do next. And there they have stayed ever since, living in abject squalor and poverty, their shantytown home known to all as ‘District 9’.

Fast forward to 2008, and Wikus Van Der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is an eager young bureaucrat working for MNU, a private company charged with the task of moving the alien population of District 9 to a more ‘habitable’ camp some miles outside of Johannesburg. Relations between humans and aliens have been degenerating steadily for a quarter of a century; distrust, disgust and ignorance stirring the already heavily churning melting pot of these new slums. The aliens don’t help themselves, of course. These are no Avatar-esque, misunderstood enlightened beings. They are intergalactic scum of the earth, trading in prostitution, mixing with Nigerian gangs, and obsessing over cat food, to which they have developed an addiction comparable to a human crack habit.

Wikus, a largely unremarkable man keen to please his father-in-law who is a high ranking MNU officer, is placed in charge of clearing the slums ready for the move. The movie opens with us following him through the corrugated iron shacks and asbestos huts, blindly filling out forms and mistreating the alien populace, or ‘prawns’ as they a pejoratively called. While clearing one such hovel, Wikus is comes into contact with a mysterious biological liquid, which slowly starts to change his physiology.

More prawns than a Chinese takeaway.

His body changing fast, Wikus suddenly goes from hunter to hunted as it becomes apparent that he is the first human to possess the ability to operate extremely sophisticated prawn weaponry, making him a valuable commodity to both his government and MNU, as well as a source of great interest to the human gangs inhabiting and exploiting District 9.

On the surface a straight forward sci-fi action flick, ‘District 9’ is an incredibly complex film. It’s primarily a journey of change for its central character, as Wikus learns the truth about these weird intergalactic creatures, and the implications of their mistreatment by himself and the rest of his race. But it’s also a comment on racial tensions in the real world, with particular reference to apartheid South Africa and the development of race relations in that country since apartheid ended. There are also other parallels, with references to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews (the new ‘home’ for the prawns is eventually referred to by Wikus as “a concentration camp, really”), the prevalence of gang culture and the unchecked power of large, private corporate organisations.

Where this film is at its most powerful, though, is on the simplest level. It’s an original, exciting, interesting story told superbly via the medium of both cinematic and pseudo-documentary styles. The idea of setting an alien-based movie in a run down, backward, technologically and socially deprived area of the world works very well. Images of run down townships full of filth and depravity inhabited by large, gangly insectoid life-forms who build disgusting egg nests inside ramshackle huts are simultaneously at odds with each other and in stark, shocking contrast. Add to that the beautifully underplayed, semi-improvised performances from Copley and the rest of the cast, and you get a startlingly original, grimy, gritty, realistic piece of political sci-fi.

There’s not many movies can be described in that way and be deemed a huge success creatively, but District 9 is certainly one of them.