Fourteen years in the past of an alternate future’s present, scientist Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) invented a new technology that would eventually allow people with disabilities to “project” themselves into society via artificial “Surrogates” — perfect android creations that could be controlled by their operators from their homes and function in the world at large just as a healthy human being could. (Not surprisingly, military applications followed quickly.)

But seven years later, Canter’s original idea had become something else entirely. A whopping 98% of the world’s citizens were now conducting their daily lives via Surrogates, causing massive reductions in crime, disease, and discrimination.

It is really that difficult to imagine? Think about how many hours a week we spend behind our computer screens, typing to friends on Facebook rather than chatting on the telephone (or better yet, in person). Think about all the video games and online communities that allow people to hide behind avatars from the comforts of their own homes. Think, too, of our reliance on technology. Even with all the strains on economies worldwide, people still find ways to pay for all the expensive bells and whistles on their cell phones every month. Imagine what we’d do if we were told the technology existed to allow us to do whatever we wanted while looking however we wanted to look.

Back to this future’s present, not everyone believes in the utility of Surrogates. Some, such as those who lock themselves away in reservations that are little more than glorified slums devoid of any technology, are more radical in their hatred of what they see as inhuman monstrosities than others. Their champion is “The Prophet” (Ving Rhames), whose fingers reach deeply into the issues concerning society’s literal new workings.

Boston-based FBI agents Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell of PITCH BLACK and SILENT HILL) uncover something dark and troubling when they investigate the destruction of Canter’s son’s Surrogate outside of a night club. Under normal circumstances, the Surrogate’s termination wouldn’t affect its at-home operator in the least. But the mysterious weapon used to fry this Surrogate also liquefied its operator’s brain in his skull, a fact that Tom’s superiors don’t want going public for fear of causing a panic.

More troubling is the fact that Canter’s son was using one of Canter’s Surrogates, suggesting that the original target had been Canter after all. But there’s more. Who stands to gain the most from making people afraid of using their Surrogates? And is Canter, fired from and publicly humiliated by the very company he helped create, a suspect himself?

As Tom and Peters will soon discover the hard way, time is running out in more ways than one — and the weapon’s masters have even bigger ideas. Matters are complicated further when Tom’s Surrogate is destroyed, and he has to continue the investigation in his own skin. He’s not been out of his house in years, and neither has his wife, Maggie (Rosamund Pike, from DIE ANOTHER DAY and AN EDUCATION). Since the death of their only son in a car accident, they can only bear to look at each other via their Surrogates — something that Tom has been fighting desperately to change.

Surrogates was directed by Jonathan Mostow, whose genre credits include BREAKDOWN, U-571, and TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES. Its screenplay comes courtesy of Michael Ferris and John Brancato, who’ve previously dealt with technology gone amok by writing both post-Cameron TERMINATOR sequels. The inspiration was a Top Shelf comic book series of the same name by writer Robert Venditti and artist Brett Weldele.

The makeup department does a fabulous job of making the actors look just plastic enough to make us believe we’re looking at androids. Radha Mitchell in particular is fabulous in this regard, giving her Surrogate a distinctive style of physical movement and facial expression that’s just slightly askew from what it should be. (In fact, if the makeup department has one failing, it’s their inability to keep Mitchell’s radiant natural beauty from shining through her character’s “real” self’s homely exterior.)

While Mitchell steals scenes as her Surrogate, Willis rises to the occasion when Tom re-enters society without the help of his own, which looks like a 50-going-on-30 version of himself with a hilariously bad blonde haircut. Willis is one of those guys who will look like an action star no matter how old he gets, and it’s refreshing to see him as a more recognizable version of himself in the film’s second half. Tom soon rediscovers the frailties of human skin, but Willis especially excels in playing the overwhelming sensory overload Tom deals with during his first steps outside in far too long a time.

Even the cities look unusually clean, which makes sense. After all, why would Surrogates need to litter or make messes? Coupled with the film’s impressive, deceptively subtle makeup effects, these intentionally sterile backgrounds go a long way toward making the world of the film feel appropriately unreal. Cinematographer Oliver Wood (U-571 and the BOURNE films, among many others) and Production Designer Jeff Mann (T3, TRANSFORMERS) do an excellent job of proving how effective a movie’s appearance can be with just a few inspired (and intelligently applied) visual choices.

The film boasts a surprisingly high degree of action, particularly in two big sequences in which Mostow demonstrates just how frighteningly capable a Surrogate can be in the hands of a capable operator. Some of the chases and brawls in T3 were compromised by subpar digital effects, but that’s not a problem here. The smash-ups in a third-act car chase are brutally and effectively staged, and the parts played by Surrogates in these scenes mix digital elements with old-fashioned techniques that create an impact you can actually feel. But the best sequence is still probably the mid-film chase during which Tom’s Surrogate is destroyed during the pursuit of a suspect through an all-too-hostile pro-human reservation.

A few of the twists in Surrogates are predictable, but their execution is anything but. The ending itself arrives with unexpected narrative and philosophical weight and is all the more effective for it. Clocking in at just 89 minutes (with only 84 minutes of actual movie, the film’s pace is generally solid and moves well thanks to a good deal of mystery and social commentary that’s interesting without being preachy.

Definitely one of my (most unexpectedly) favorite films of 2009.

(The quotes in this article were taken from the film’s official press notes.)

Once upon a time, a giant flying saucer with all the texture and grace of a primitive steel factory came to Earth. Just as surprising as its arrival was its location — it didn’t stop above any of the usual suspects like Manhattan, or Washington, D.C., or Chicago. It came to rest in the skies directly over Johannesburg in South Africa — and it just sat there.

No heat rays. No invading alien armies. No agenda. The whole world waited with baited breath for a first contact that never came, so we flew up there and cut our way inside to find a dying hive of insect-like creatures whose appearance earned them the derogatory nickname “Prawns.”

Not content to let them live (or die) on their ship, we dragged them down and gave them a home called District 9 while all the world’s nations tried to figure out what to do for them — or with them.

As those first few months became 20 years, the fenced-in District 9 devolved into a dirty, dangerous, militarized slum. Multi-Nation United (MNU) was formed to manage the Prawns, though their interests were focused far more sharply on harnessing the Prawns’ alien weaponry for human use than on anything remotely resembling maintenance of the creatures’ well-being. But even those attempts hit dead ends when we figured out that their biological firing mechanisms could only be triggered by their specific alien DNA.

So what now? Do we kill them, or just keep moving all 1.8 million of them around? The film begins as a documentary about the Prawns’ arrival and history as it chronicles MNU’s plan to move the Prawns “happily and safely” to an “Alien Relocation Camp” 200 kilometers outside of Johannesburg. The brochure makes it look quite inviting. The real thing looks like a concentration camp.

Complicating matters are the Nigerian gangsters who’ve flocked to District 9 under the guise of “trading” with the Prawns. They hoard the Prawns’ prized commodity — cat food — while stockpiling weapons both human and alien. But their true intentions run deeper and darker than commerce — their leader follows a superstitious and ritualistic belief that if he eats enough aliens, he’ll absorb enough of their DNA to be able to use their guns.

Good-hearted but inexperienced MNU official Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is placed in charge of evicting the Prawns from their current shacks in District 9 while convincing them that their new “homes” will be equivalent to a deeee-luxe apartment in the sky. Wikus must also cope with the cruelty of Koobus (David James), MNU’s chief of military operations.

“Wikus is Afrikaaner, which is perceived by some in South Africa as a kind of a redneck,” James explains. “I decided that I would play Koobus as English, a man who has spent his military service out of country. Even at the outset, in every way, he sees himself as being superior to Wikus.”

As you can imagine, it all goes very badly. “A small amount of power goes a long way with Wikus,” says Copley, a filmmaker himself who’s a lifelong friend and collaborator of District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. “He’s an ordinary guy who likes to wield power in a bureaucratic way. That’s why MNU promotes him — they want a guy who will do things in an orderly, proper way.”

Copley’s work in such scenes is masterful, with both humor and tension rising from Wikus’s sincere but constantly foiled attempts to get the Prawns to listen to (and obey) the rules and regulations of the human world. Its even more impressive when you consider that Copley wasn’t a professional actor. His performance, therefore, comes across as entirely instinctual rather than in anyway way rehearsed or informed, and the movie is so, so much better because of that.

“Neill has found a very soulful way of approaching science fiction,” Copley continues. “The genre can be clinical, even cold and unemotional. But in Neill’s hands, it resonates quite deeply. There’s no particular message or big moral of the story — it’s just a melting pot of emotions that comes out.”

Other things come out quite literally, but the less you know about this film going in into it, the better. To its credit and benefit, DISTRICT 9 isn’t quite the film its trailer makes it out to be. There’s something deeper going on here that asks bigger questions. What happens to a man who’s not seeking a holy grail but unwittingly becomes it himself?  How much humanity can you lose and still be considered human? Such morality certainly comes into question, but never at the expense of gripping character drama and gritty action sequences that gain momentum and brutality from the realism with which they’re staged and shot.

What could have been a jarring mix of visual and narrative formats plays seamlessly. “Essentially, the film bounces from our story, which is obviously fictional, to a sort of ultra‐real mode,” Blomkamp says. “It’s all part of the same story; the movie fluctuates between something that feels like a film and something that feels bizarrely real.”

Adding to that feeling is the astonishing near-perfection of the visual effects, which rarely look anything less than utterly photo-realistic. Actor Jason Cope talks about helping bring the Prawns — including the elder member of a pivotal father-son Prawn duo — to life: “I play about ten different characters. It was quite a thing to wake up and say, ‘Which creature will I be today?’ My mom was very excited when I got the part. She asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m playing a community of intergalactic beings in the townships.’ She couldn’t quite get her head around it.”

Luckily, she didn’t have to. “Neill had a very clear idea about what he wanted from the non-humans,” Cope continues. “During the rehearsal process, we got a feel for what he liked, but he also gave me a lot of freedom, within certain boundaries. I wouldn’t act too much like an animal or an insect, but I’m definitely not acting human, either.”

Copely certainly approved of his co-star’s methods. “Jason is a terrific actor to play off of. Those were some of the best scenes in the film for me.”

On-Set Effects Supervisor Joe Dunckley describes the Prawns as having “an insect exo-skeleton crossed with that of a crustacean. They have sinewy, delicate joints between the hard shell areas, similar to a crab or crawfish. They’re meant to be entirely disgusting. They secrete some sort of resin, so we used various forms of goo to give them that high shine and life‐like appearance.”

WETA Workshop provided the drawing boards, and where there’s a WETA, there’s a Peter Jackson. The man who successfully brought The Lord of the Rings trilogy to the big screen is both a friend and a mentor to Blomkamp and serves as a producer on the film — which wasn’t always what it turned out to be. “We were considering a production of HALO, based on the video game,” Jackson says. “That movie never happened, but we loved working with Neill so much that when he pitched us DISTRICT 9, we decided it would be fun to turn his idea into a feature film.”

For a fraction of the cost, DISTRICT 9 looks better and most certainly plays better than its last-summer rivals like TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN and G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA. Its story and its presentation are as wholly original as its scares and thrills are exciting and unpredictable. This is an audience-pleasing thrill-ride you’ll still be discussing and debating with your friends for hours after it’s finished.