A few years back, Peter Jackson, a movie maker who has the distinction of never having produced a bad film yet, decided it would be a good idea to make a Halo film and chose young director Neil Blomkamp to helm it. When the budget of that reached 145 million dollars, the studios canned it. Jackson went to Blomkamp and essentially said "Sorry that didn't work out. Here's 30 million dollars. Go make whatever you like."

They then set out to expand Blomkamp's attention grabbing short film, Alive in Joburg, into a full length feature.

The result is District 9. The best movie of this year.

Basically a darker take on the premise of the old TV show Alien Nation. A derelict spaceship comes to a halt above the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. After three months of complete silence, the government has the ship boarded. Inside they discover a horde of extremely ill and starving alien refugees who are incapable of piloting their space craft on their own. Almost all of them are pea brained drones whose leaders have mysteriously disappeared.

The aliens are transported by the government to the walled off slum of the title, where they are kept "safely" separate from humans. Here they live in squalor and are oppressed by an evil megacorporation known as Multinational United, which has been tasked with all human-alien affairs. Inter-species tensions are running high, violence is breaking out, and the corporation in charge seems to be up to something fishy. The main story unfolds through the eyes of a petty bureaucrat who finds himself caught in the middle and way over his head.

And that's really all I can tell you. Go see the movie. Be surprised for yourself. It's worth it.
Around the time the new Star Trek movie came out it had somehow become completely unreasonable to expect that a science fiction film be both intelligent and exciting. District 9 takes that notion and grinds it to dust. Here's a movie with better aliens than Star Trek, better gunfights than G.I. Joe, better mecha than Transformers, and better effects than Terminator.

But it's also smart! It's got a brain in its head. It's a very serious and layered movie with a complex story and richly drawn, realistic characters. It's actually about stuff! Action scenes get better when people you care about are in the fight and you understand why they're fighting. People still get this right?

Neil Blomkamp is a great find! Here's a talented director with a big imagination and the skill to realize it. He did a high wire act with this movie between biting socio-political commentary and hardcore action. People being vaporized by alien superguns often occur at the same moment as dark observations about cross-cultural interaction, or the lack thereof, and he pulls it off with stunning grace.

Seriously, do not miss out on District 9. Do not wait for DVD. Do not pirate it. Someone went out of their way to make a movie that's incredibly intelligent, ridiculously action-packed, and frighteningly relevant. Show them some support. This is the sort of movie I've been waiting for all year and it was worth it.