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Pieces of a movie

'District 9' is cobbled from other films; it’s a chase flick, sci-fi & documentary

The big buzz word on the sci-fi movie "District 9" is "original," but I think buffs will have the most fun counting ideas borrowed from other movies.

It's ingenious borrowing, for sure. South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp takes ideas, images and effects from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Transformers," "Starship Troopers," "The Fly," and a dozen other movies, and fashions them into his own vision (though some credit it to producer Peter Jackson).

The title echoes the cult action film "District B13," and the premise is similar - an authoritarian and possibly racist government decides the only way to clean up conditions in a squalid ghetto is to destroy it.

The wrinkle in "District 9": The illegal aliens and immigrants are truly alien, immigrants from another solar system. Their enormous, incapacitated spaceship hovers over the city of Johannesburg like a grainy eyesore in a layer of smog, just another form of pollution.

It's been stuck there for 20 years, and the sickly creatures pulled from its bowels live in a heavily guarded shantytown, left to fight over scraps (they seem to like cat food) in the district garbage heap, exploited by Nigerian gangsters. (There is interspecies prostitution. I mention this should you be thinking of taking your kids, which you should not. This is a hard "R.")

Director Blomkamp's fake documentary framework establishes most of this in the first few minutes, then follows a government man (Sharlto Copley, very Dennis Weaver-ish) as he leads a group of social workers, backed by heavily armed troops, on a mission to move the aliens to a nearby tent city.

The mission is cloaked in humanitarian verbiage, but the government officials know it's a forced march, with certain casualties. Nobody seems too outraged - there's a general feeling that applying humanitarian principles to nonhuman creatures is a waste of time.

The downbeat premise, the washed-out digital tones and the absence of a single likable character combine to make "District 9" a bit of a chore to watch. The director's style - shooting a million angles, stitching everything together in bursts of split-second cuts - left me feeling as though Chinese Olympians had played ping-pong with my eyeballs.

But "District 9" pulls something from all of this rubble. You grow more and more impressed with the level of detail - District 9 is a horrible place, but it starts to feel like a real horrible place, and the plight of its ugly inhabitants begins, against all odds, to earn our sympathy.

While the human characters are kept in the margins, we begin to learn things about some of the alien bugs. While most are treated as animals and behave as such, we find reason to care about the secret plans of a few industrious exceptions.

The government raid turns out to be a debacle, one that could have been avoided with a little interspecies compassion. You know, walk a mile in the other guy's claw. This is something Copley's character learns the hard way, in a plot twist David Cronenberg would probably love.