Sometimes, having your first movie fall apart under you is the best thing that can happen to a budding filmmaker.

At least that's the case for 29-year-old Neill Blomkamp, who was preparing to make his directorial debut with a big-budget film adaptation of the bestselling video game Halo. Blomkamp had landed the gig on the strength of a six-minute short -- Alive in Joberg, about extraterrestrials in post-apartheid Johannesburg -- he had made with friends as a calling card for the industry.

He was five months into preproduction on Halo, working with producer Peter Jackson's New Zealand-based special-effects company WETA Workshop, when the project crumbled in disagreements between the two financing studios, 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures.

``We had writers working on the story, and I had already designed about 2,000 illustrations of what every little detail in the movie would look like,'' Blomkamp says during a Miami visit to promote District 9, the film that would eventually become his directorial debut.

Literally a day after the plug on Halo was pulled, Blomkamp says, Jackson approached him with a consolation prize. ``He said `Clearly you're a creative person. I want to work with you, and you already know all the production teams here, so why don't we turn all this work into something else and make a new film?' ''

Jackson's screenwriting partner Fran Walsh suggested expanding Alive in Joberg into a feature. The result, District 9, is one of the most dynamic and exciting debuts in years, an expertly calibrated and original science-fiction adventure that imagines what happens when a spaceship transporting almost two million slimy extra-terrestrials stalls over the skies of Johannesburg, and the E.T.s are forced to move into a cordoned-off slum.

For Blomkamp, who was born in South Africa, raised under the shadow of apartheid and considers Alien and Aliens two of the most influential films he saw as a youth, the new movie was inspired by a simple idea.

``I left [Johannesburg] when I was 18 and moved to Vancouver, and in the years later, I became more and more interested in the city's political and racial history,'' Blomkamp says. ``I was also a massive science-fiction fan, and one day something just clicked, and I realized I had just never seen science-fiction in that South African setting. I wanted to know what that would look like.''

Much like the short film that inspired it, District 9 uses its tale of aliens segregated from the human population as a metaphor for apartheid. But the movie wields its subtexts lightly: This is, first and foremost, a knockout, rock-and-roll, sci-fi romp.

``That was one of the most important things for me -- how to balance the [apartheid theme] with the Hollywood-ride aspect of the movie,'' Blomkamp says. ``In the first few months of writing, I realized I was coming up with the wrong story, because it was way too serious. The metaphoric elements were too self-important, and I was beating the audience over the head with them.''

Blomkamp settled on a faux-documentary approach, incorporating TV news reports and handheld-camera footage into the plot. To play the central role of an office drone who winds up a little too close for comfort to the alien population, Blomkamp turned to his childhood friend and fellow aspiring filmmaker Sharlto Copley, who had previously helped him with the six-minute short.

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