In the immortal words of fictional rock stars Spinal Tap, it's such a fine line between stupid and clever. Further proof of this dictum comes this month from sci-fi flick "District 9," a South-African production featuring the talents of New Zealand's WETA digital effects studio and produced by Peter Jackson.
Director Neill Blomkamp starts his film off on the clever side of things, postulating an alien invasion that's not your standard "War of the Worlds"-type unstoppable menace, but just a derelict spacecraft full of intergalactic boat people. Give us your tired, huddled masses of insectoids yearning to be welfare bums . . . it's a whole new spin on the idea of illegal "aliens."
Blomkamp, drawing on the grand old tradition of George A. Romero ("Night of the Living Dead"), mixes raw genre movie pulp with some sly socio-political commentary. When a massive spaceship appears above Johannesburg, South Africa, and dumps around a million malnourished, crustacean-like aliens into the care of the state, it becomes a humanitarian crisis that threatens to spin out of control.