How good is Neill Blomkamp's District 9?  Good enough that I expect the studio exec who pulled the plug on a Blomkamp-directed Halo will be fired within the next week, if they haven't been already. Good enough that it may very well be one of the rare films to cross over from hardcore geek love to mass appeal and commercial success. Good enough that it's not only the best film of the summer season - by a fairly healthy margin, I might add - but also marks the arrival of one of the most distinct voices in international science fiction in a good couple decades. Blomkamp is one hell of a director and he's dropped a flat-out masterpiece in our laps his very first time out of the gate. And given that the guy's not even thirty yet I'd say the future has a whole lot more in store for him.

A total inversion of the alien invasion film, District 9 begins as a mock-doc following Wikus Van De Merwe - played by stellar first time actor Sharlto Copley - a likable, slightly buffoonish man who works for the MNU, a Johannesberg-based agency created to deal with alien relations when a massive spacecraft lost power and stalled over the city twenty years earlier. But while it may be easy to like Wikus, it quickly becomes hard to like the MNU, which is little more than a thinly veiled front for a weapons company thirsting for access to alien technology. Their 'care' of the alien passengers - referred to as prawn - is to simply pack them into a slum, keep them addicted to tinned cat food, and try to keep them separate from the human population. With tensions between humans and prawn rising, the MNU has decided to forcibly evict the prawn from their current housing and move them two hundred miles outside of the border of the city into what amounts to little more than a concentration camp, a task that the ill-equipped Wikus is charged with leading by virtue of the fact that he is married to the boss' daughter.

And here's where things get decidedly darker and more interesting in a big hurry. With Blomkamp shifting the filming style away from the documentary that he began with and into a taut, over-the-shoulder vérité style of narrative so smoothly that you barely even notice the transition, we follow Wikus and his team into District 9, the alien slum. The aliens live by rummaging through garbage, with African gangs allowed to live within their borders to provide some easy prey. They cannot work, and they have no chance of a better life. They are scarcely even treated as sentient - a remarkable piece of arrogance on behalf of their human hosts given that their enormous bloody spaceship is floating directly over head. In an obvious nod to the history of apartheid in Blomkamp's home country, the aliens are simply shoved to the side by virtue of their being different, a status that allows even someone as likable as Wikus to carry out simply horrible atrocities against them without giving it a second thought. Aliens are bullied and bribed into signing their eviction papers and, when that fails, either led by addiction or threatened at gunpoint to do so. Doors are kicked in, belongings confiscated, the aliens themselves treated as little more than fleshy inconveniences. In one particularly shocking moment, Wikus giggles with childlike excitement over how burning alien eggs sound just like popcorn when they explode as his team sets alight an illicit breeding pen with no attention paid to the fact that the popping sounds also represent the ending of hundreds of lives.

Wikus' lack of respect for the alien culture ultimately leads to traumatic changes in his own when exposure to an alien fluid triggers the rewriting of his own DNA, transforming him into a human-alien hybrid and - coincidentally - the only human on the face of the planet able to use the aliens' biometrically activated weapons technology, a fact not lost on his own father-in-law who - without hesitation - backs Wikus' capture and dissection hoping to unlock the secrets to alien technology and massive profits for MNU. On the run, Wikus' only hope is that the aliens he has helped to oppress may be able to reverse the transformation...

No matter how you choose to approach it, District 9 is an enormous success. Science fiction geeks get their alien tech and weaponry on full display, dramatists get universally strong performances, those looking a little deeper get a potent allegory for apartheid and human mistreatment of anything 'other'.  This is a film with ambitions that go far beyond simple entertainment and it strikes that balance flawlessly. No small part of that is Blomkamp's enormous technical skills, skills that allow him to wring a shocking amount of genuine emotion out of his alien creations - his creatures never feeling like anything less than actual living and breathing organisms. For an effects-turned-feature director like Blomkamp the temptation must have been huge to simply plow his entire budget into making things go boom to give the audience a thrill. But while there are thrills a-plenty - the alien tech is very, very cool and the sequence where Wikus mans an alien suit of exo-skeleton battle armor is simply astounding - Blomkamp resolutely employs his effects crew only in support of the story, never losing sight of his characters, a decision that gives the entire affair an enormous emotional wallop.

Calling a man's first film a masterpiece is placing a huge amount of pressure on both him and his work. It may not be entirely fair to do so. But it's true. With the right people in his corner - District 9  has been backed and championed by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson - and the right decisions, Blomkamp could very well end up being this generation's Spielberg, a director who neatly balances mass appeal and critical acclaim, all of it backed up by enormous technical skills. It really is that good.