If you want to call it a new genre, I wouldn’t blame you. District 9 is probably the strangest movie of the year, and it’s great that such a new formula can be put into an imaginative summer blockbuster and not be released in fewer than 100 theaters. If you want an original, gritty, and realistic movie about aliens, this is it.

The film centers around the location of District 9, a government-controlled camp used to keep a species of alien creatures separate from humans. These aliens, nicknamed “prawns”, arrived in a broken-down spaceship that has been hovering over an area in South Africa for almost 3 decades. The prawns are crablike and speak in traditional sci-fi clicks and clacks, root through garbage for food (which can range from catfood to cardboard), and are viewed as scum from the eyes of citizens living in the nearby city of Johannesburg. Some of the aliens are more savage than others, some more intelligent, and it’s interesting how all of the aliens are animated with different personality despite just looking like giant walking lobsters.

Over the years, as the opening sequence cleverly shows us through reports and interviews, District 9 has become slum. The Nigerians set up a black market and are the secret rulers of the area, but other than that, no humans set foot anywhere near the grounds. The government decides to move the aliens to District 10, a newer home for the aliens, and hire forces at the MNU to relocate them. Here is when we discover that the prawns are victim to violence and abuse, solely for the humans’ amusement.

So it’s a very refreshing take on a popular science-fiction element. The first part is done like a mockumentary, or some kind of special report on the news with interviews and everything, but that idea is dropped all of a sudden in favor of the “camera on a unicycle” genre. You know, the movies where they hire the guy from Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project to operate the camera. At first, I didn’t even know it had dropped the mockumentary aspect, and that got confusing. But when it just appeared again later, it got annoying. It’s as if the filmmakers couldn’t make up their mind, so they created some hybrid of “found footage” and just normal film making.

So yeah, inconsistency was a problem with District 9. Like how the English-speaking Nigerians would have subtitles to help you understand them under their thick accent, but how they wouldn’t include them if they were more understandable. So it’s as if the mockumentary kept going on without actually being a mockumentary. The aliens are also subtitled, which is helpful, but I wondered what it would be like if audiences didn’t have the help of those subtitles. There would have had more mystery behind the aliens, and since the animators did such a great job giving them facial expressions, it would have been interesting trying to decipher their language rather than be told what they were saying. Additionally, the humans happen to understand the alien language as well, so you could fill in the blanks based on their dialogue.

But the main reason District 9 works so well is that it depicts a negative side, but a truthful one, as to what would happen if an alien race arrived on earth. It creates a perfect setting that is constantly developed throughout the movie, so it never gets boring and holds your attention until the very end. I would reveal more, but it’s the kind of movie that you should just go into without any prior knowledge, which is impossible now that you’ve seen the trailer, but I bet that if you lived in a bunker for the past 45 years with nothing but a DVD player and no form of outside communication and somehow you got your hands on this movie, you’d believe every second of it.