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District 9 shot to the top of the US box office in its opening weekend and earned the kind of reviews that eluded George Lucas even the first time around.
Its modest credentials include a 29-year-old debutant director, a budget of just $30m and a cast of unknowns.
District 9 wears its politics most lightly, making no mention of apartheid or its legacy in today’s impoverished black townships.
But the allegorical overtones are inescapable in the plot about aliens who, their spaceship stranded above Johannesburg, have to endure a daily routine of unemployment, gangsterism and xenophobia in a squalid shantytown.
Poor aliens… after trekking halfway across the galaxy, they run out of gas and end up living off cat food in, of all places, 1980s Johannesburg.
Then they get the kind of reception that asylum seekers who don’t speak the language have come to expect. This is the improbable premise of the surprise sci-fi hit of the year.
The Prawns – as they are known in derogatory slang because of their vaguely crustacean appearance – spend their hopeless days brawling and getting high on pet food.
District 9’s director, Neill Blomkamp, lives in Canada, but was born and grew up in Johannesburg.
“In my opinion, the film doesn’t exist without Jo’burg, It’s not like I had a story, and then I was trying to pick a city.
“It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future.
“What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.”