An expertly crafted exercise in thrill, pathos and outrage, District 9 marked a return to the socially-conscious roots of sci-fi, and managed to claw back some class for the genre after the outrages of Transformers and other multiplex cousins. Steeped in overt allusions to South Africa's brutally segregated past, (then-)newcomer Neill Blomkamp’s film put a fraught, deeply felt undertone to work beneath the futuristic gloss of its shoot-em-up veneer.

Arriving on screen reeking of real-life inhumanity, District 9 can look beyond standard dystopian shallowness to draw parallels with general patterns of human cruelty — and human decency — in the twentieth century and beyond. Using a mockumentary format to follow incompetent pen-pusher Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) on a quest to evict ‘prawns’ — refugee aliens — from their militarized slum, District 9 draws on a long and horrible human inheritance of interment and oppression, casting it into an all-too-plausible future. Regardless of the passage of time, or the novelty of race or species, the film argues bluntly that brutalization will recur again and again if greed goes unchecked by empathy.

There is hope, however, in the film’s message, which throws out small, palatable nuggets of emotional connection alongside its sci-fi weaponry and rasping, goo-spewing alien masses. Sent into the slum to transfer the aliens to a new camp run by his employer, Wikus finds himself contaminated by an apparent alien IED, which causes him to mutate both physically and emotionally into the messiah of the oppressed aliens. For their turn, two prawns, the improbably named Christopher Johnson and his adorable, moist-eyed son Christopher Junior, or CJ, prove Wikus’ only salvation when the establishment turns on him.

While District 9 draws stylistically on the bug-eyed aliens and gigantic monsters that stalked American cinema screens in the mid-20th century, its message differs radically: the aliens of this film serve not to be eliminated, but to be understood, drawing out humanity through its powers of empathy rather than destruction. Though it lifts some visual references from postwar and Cold War era films, particularly with its striking image of the flying saucer hovering over the slum, District 9 serves to highlight just how far the hopes and ideals of human nature, expressed in blockbuster sci-fi, have progressed: the human self and the alien other depicted as two halves of the same whole. By using science fiction to overturn the genre’s age-old belief that biological difference can justify abuse and oppression, District 9 highlights the potential of its medium to challenge the status quo. With the upcoming sequel set to draw on American history, Blomkamp will certainly have his work cut out in determining if this initial optimism was misplaced.