Is District 9 director Neill Blomkamp the new Steven Spielberg?

Has the film industry finally found its new Steven Spielberg? The huge success of District 9, the debut film by a young South African-born Canadian, Neill Blomkamp, suggests Hollywood has discovered a director with just the sort of gutsy panache and story-telling powers that made Spielberg a star in his twenties.

Blomkamp's film, which follows a group of aliens who land in Johannesburg, has become the stealth sci-fi hit of the summer, invading the US box office via a savvy viral marketing campaign.

Despite its paltry $30m budget, first-time director and largely unknown cast, the film easily knocked GI Joe from the No 1 spot when it opened two weeks ago. It grossed an impressive $37 million at the box office in its first weekend and now, as it opens in Britain, it's already heading for the $100 million mark.
 
District 9 starts with a scene familiar from many alien movies - a giant flying saucer hovering above a city. However this is not Manhattan or Washington, but Johannesburg. The arthropod aliens who land in South Africa in 1982 are starving extraterrestrial refugees. After being rescued they are placed in a temporary camp.

And so an exhilarating action film becomes an allegory of racism and apartheid as the alien camp becomes a squalid slum - 'District 9' - and a government-backed corporation, the Multi-National United (MNU), is tasked with clearing it out.

Blomkamp, who moved to Vancouver when he was 18, was inspired by events that took place under apartheid in a segregated area of Cape Town called District Six. He was 14 at the end of apartheid, and says he has drawn upon "many years of things accumulated without knowing - I guess I must have just been soaking it up. And those scenes tended to be scenes of segregation."

How the film came about is a Hollywood gem in itself. Blomkamp was 26 - about the same age as Spielberg when he started out on his first mega-hit Jaws - and already making a name for himself as a visual effects wizard when he was offered the chance to make a film version of the cult computer game Halo, under Lord of the Rings producer Peter Jackson.

Blomkamp moved to New Zealand, where Jackson is based, and spent six months developing the project before it collapsed.
 
Instead of sending the young man packing, Jackson suggested he should make something else instead. Blomkamp said he wanted to make a feature film based on a 2005 short he had made called Alive in Joburg. Jackson organised the funding, Blomkamp got to work on a screenplay with his screenwriting partner and girlfriend Terri Tatchell, and the rest is history.
 
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:
Chris Hewitt, Empire: "District 9 works primarily as a fun thriller, peopled - or aliened - by some of the best (and strangest) extraterrestrials this side of ET. Eschewing the guy-in-a-suit approach, Blomkamp plumps for aliens that truly define the word: non-humanoid, multi-limbed clicking monstrosities, derogatorily referred to as "prawns", that can leap small buildings in a single bound, rip a man's head off in a heartbeat and interact seamlessly with humans, their jittery body language strangely, beguilingly, human." (Verdict: four stars out of five)

A O Scott, New York Times: "District 9 subtly shifts from speculative science-fiction to zombie bio-horror and then, less subtly, turns into an escape-action-chase movie full of explosions, gunplay and vehicular mayhem. In the midst of it all you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing and the inventiveness of the special effects. Not the least of these are the aliens themselves, who are made expressive and soulful without quite being anthropomorphised."

Betsy Sharkey, LA Times: "Blomkamp has seeded irony and analogies throughout District 9 as he makes his way through a myriad of modern anxieties including the racial divide, class differences, big business, broadcast news and the big-brother world of reality TV. One of the many themes Blomkamp kicks around is the numbing effect of the endless loop of information and analysis on cable news..." ·