I love alien movies.

Basically I'll go see any movie with a spaceship and/or aliens in it; no matter how badly made, no matter how ridiculous the premise. In fact, the more ridiculous the better.

(I have a special fondness for obscure 1950s sci fi like "I Married a Monster from Outer Space," "Wasp Woman," and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.")

So when I went to see the new Peter Jackson movie District 9 this past Friday, I wasn't expecting much. I just wanted some to see me some aliens and some action. I knew Jackson directed the Lord of the Rings movies and that he was a much better than average director, and I knew the movie included a large spaceship hovering over South Africa. That was enough to get me to fork over $5 for a ticket and another $7.50 for popcorn and a Diet Coke.

I wasn't expecting War and Peace or King Lear.

Whatever I wasn't expecting, I got all that and much more, almost too much.

District 9 is a very disturbing movie. I'm giving you this warning straight up: If you're squeamish and lean toward E.T. and Cocoon, you'd better have a session with your therapist booked shortly after you get out. What's more, District 9 grabs you early on and moves along at such a fast clip for the rest of the movie that you never even get a lull for a bathroom break. At no point does it seem like you won't miss much if you duck out for five minutes or even one.

That's really hard on someone with a 56 year old bladder, so trust me on this: If you've had more than one kid, don't get the large size drink.

District 9 starts from a different set of assumptions than most alien invasion movies.

One day a huge spaceship grinds to a stop over Johannesburg and a small chunk of it falls to earth and disappears. When military teams and scientists are dispatched to the ship to investigate, they find a crew of very sick, barely alive alien creatures that look a little bit like human insects. We are told they are drones, and that they lack direction and purpose without their leader, who presumably was lost in the bit of refuse that fell when the ship was disabled.

The aliens are brought back to earth and set up in a refugee camp where they are nursed back to health. Meanwhile the countries of Earth argue about what to do next. Alien technology is of special interest to weapons corporations, since it seems to be based on both organic and mechanical engineering. Only the aliens can fire their own weapons or enable any of the systems on the ship. Their own tissue becomes a part of and interacts with the technology itself. (I thought this bit alone was really fascinating.)

Years later, no decisions have been made, the ship is still disabled, and the alien refugee camp has become a shantytown slum of corrugated metal huts and piles of refuse. Tensions between the quarantined alien population and the surrounding humans have reached a fever pitch. In response to human complaints about the conditions in District 9 (the slum where the aliens are quarantined), the South African government sets itself the task of moving the entire population of aliens to a tent camp far away from human habitation (District 10).

The film is shot in low-budget mockumentary style. Fake news clips are interspersed with interviews in which 'experts' recount the backstory as if it were actual history, and action scenes are shot with handheld minicams. Unlike the Blair Witch or Cloverfield (movies which also used these gimmicks), these techniques are handled well enough to be convincing and the camera shots are steady enough that you don't get sea sick just from watching people walk around.

You will get sick though. Count on it.

The gore in District 9 is different both in quantity and in kind than that of stock horror films in that it is believable and unrelenting. The imaginary human/alien DMZ soon feels all too real and comforting thoughts of corn syrup vanish like the lap belt on the Tilt O Whirl. I personally think this believability is one of the strengths of the film, but I also know more than one casual movie goer who left the theater in disgust, overwhelmed by the violence and the general 'OMG' factor. I watched several segments through my fingers.

The protagonist is a nerdy little bureaucrat named Wikus (pronounced vy-kus) Van De Merwe, the kind of guy you'd take the stairs to avoid having to chat up in the elevator. Wikus is slight, goofy, and dresses in the unintentionally retro way that all annoying little guys who carry around clipboards and pocket protectors seem to dress: way too much polyester, not nearly enough common sense.

Wikus condescends to the aliens in the most fawning, irritating way; and it's clear from the very first scenes that none of his coworkers have the slightest respect for him. We find out shortly that Wikus has been put in charge of moving the alien population to District 10 via his politically connected father-in-law, a Dick Cheney sort of guy whose Vader-esque persona only makes Wikus look like an even bigger patsy. He's hard to like, and his idiotic devotion to what is by any measure a horrible, immoral job makes him seem like a jerk as well as a fool.

As the film opens, Wikus and a team of international mercenaries (which very much resembles the Blackwater team in Iraq) is going door to door in District 9 in giant white HumVee-type vehicles, procuring alien signatures on eviction notices which some South African bureaucrat has determined to be a legal prerequisite to relocating the aliens to District 10.

Almost all the aliens tell Wikus and the mercenaries to stuff it or worse (they speak through a series of clicks and odd insect-like noises), and we see the mercenaries in action, blowing some aliens to bits with zero remorse. Finding contraband weaponry in one metal hut, Wikus inadvertently sprays himself with some fluid from a scrap of the alien technology, and from that moment forward Wikus begins to slowly change form, both inside and out. It's a testament to the skill of the writers and directors that the more alien Wikus becomes, the more we start to care about him: that's a tough reversal to pull off, but they manage it.

District 9 has a lot in common in look and feel with zombie flicks. The tone and the scenery is gritty, dirty, scary, apocalyptic, and filled with extreme violence and dark viscous fluids that are sickening even when you don't know what they hell they are. The mercenaries blow the aliens away with the same over-the-top zest that zombie killers do, except that, unlike zombies, the aliens gradually become more sympathetic as the film wears on, the humans less so, until by the end you definitely see people as the bad guys, the stranded bugs as galactic antiheroes.

Reviewers are making a big deal out of District 9 as a metaphor for South African apartheid. You can certainly take that from the film if you want to, but I saw in it a much broader and much darker metaphor about the increasingly militarized relationship between the developed world (especially the U.S.) and the Third World (especially Africa and the Middle East). It's not a comfortable metaphor, and you never get to rest your hopes anywhere for more than a nanosecond. District 9 is a dark vision of the level of hell we currently inhabit on Planet Earth in real life. It's credibility and familiarity are what make it most terrifying.

The film works on several levels, the most shallow being that of a well-made action flick. By the middle of the movie lots of stuff is blowing up pretty regularly and we get cool technology and chase scenes and so on and so forth. Supporting that level is good writing and really good directing and editing. But the film hit me hardest where I least expected and in a way that left me sickened and disturbed: as real commentary on real world politics.

Alien movies are always about the Other. In the 50s the Other was Communism and the fear of mind control and invasion by an alien political sensibility. In the 70s and 80s, with the publication of books like Communion and Fire in the Sky, the Other was more personal, more immediate, and more spiritual--something in our own dreams and nightmares--some banished part of ourselves come back to push its way into shared consciousness and damn the consequences.

In District 9 the Other is portrayed as the most human and most humane part of us, the part that has been cordoned off at the point of a lot of weaponry and barbed wire all for the sake of maintaining the status quo, no matter how toxic that status quo might be.

In my favorite review of the film, NYT critic A.O. Scott writes:

At its core the film tells the story — hardly an unfamiliar one in the literature of modern South Africa — of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes aware of the injustice that keeps him in his place and the others, his designated inferiors, in theirs. The cost he pays for this knowledge is severe, as it must be, given the dreadful contours of the system. But if the film’s view of the world is bleak, it is not quite nihilistic. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated.

District 9 features no hobbits, no unicorns, no rainbows. It's an important and disturbing film, one that I predict will take its place besides classics like Night of the Living Dead as a daring, genre-busting first.