Imagine if Franz Kafka had thought to give Gregor a splatter-blast ray-gun. Or if Speilberg had equipped Schindler with a mechanized bio-suit capable of hurling trucks across town. Picture the favela slums of Fernando Meirelles’ “City of God” populated with filthy eight-foot-tall bipedal lobsters. If Paul Verhoeven grew a conscience. If David Cronenberg bought a computer. If Michael Moore had directed “Starship Troopers.” We’re closing in on “District 9.”

The first feature film from advertising and short film whiz-kid Neill Blomkamp, produced by celebrated Ring Lord Peter Jackson, is a work of breathtaking science fiction. The story, in which a million indigent worker drone space-bugs park their gargantuan broken down UFO bus over Johannesburg and are subsequently segregated into a squalid barbed wire and plywood shantytown by a clearly immoral international conglomerate charged with their “welfare,” centers around the, er, transformative journey of a bigoted pencil-pushing corporate nerd employed to relocate the wretched creatures to even worse circumstances farther from the city’s frightened human populace.

Though obviously a rude way to treat guests, uninvited or not, to the humans’ credit, the aliens really are all kinds of repugnant. Rooting through garbage and pilfering whatever they care to, they stalk around in ratty, unwashed rags, angrily croaking out invectives from their slimy, tentacly faces. Like a hill of giant ants who’ve lost their queen, they are undirected, unproductive, uncooperative beings who give every impression that at any moment they might just eat your dog and drink all your beer. They are not smart. A rather unmotivated lot, they lack even the initiative to defend themselves against the human oppressors with their array of awesome artillery, preferring to hawk it off to Nigerian black marketeers for cans of delicious, delicious cat food.

Naturally, the humans, both corporate and underground, waste no time in exploiting these facts to get hold of the advanced technology. The fact that the alien gear is all biologically dependent on alien DNA to function is beside the immediate point. Nothing a little time and vivisection couldn’t fix.

Enter Wikus Van De Merwe, the empty suit on a mission of mass eviction, a puny little jerk backed by an army of redneck mercenaries. Like the alien “prawns,” he’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the shack, has little initiative or command of his own, and is also fairly unpleasant in his own culturally misguided white-guy way. Introduced as a corporate nobody at the bottom of the bureaucratic food chain, a clumsy mishap doses him with a faceful of mysterious mutational alien biofuel that Brundleflies him the ability to operate the alien tech, and he very suddenly becomes the most sought after commodity on the planet.

As the tables turn, Wikus himself is driven from his home and family, forced to run, hide, forage and steal for his own survival, eventually becoming an unlikely, if still self-interested, freedom fighter for the abused alien camp. Completely improvised by never-done-anything-before South African actor Sharlto Copley, the subtle shifts in Van De Merwe’s character are not remotely as obvious onscreen as they may seem in print.

Filmed in a fabulously effective faux-documentary “found footage” style, and sporting flawlessly integrated CGI work by Jackson’s pals at Weta Workshop, the film succeeds on just about every level, establishing its political agenda early on and then very deliberately kicking into full-bore plasma blasting action. The first act, concerned mainly with hyper-realistic TV news reports and talking head interviews with various yackedemics describing the unsavory business of the human response to initial alien contact, is fascinating and provocative. And then the gloves come off, and the second two thirds of the film just crank, introducing progressively increasing levels of tension, investment, emotion and, well, bloodshed. As mentor to the freshman director, Jackson has said his main directive was simply to “add more splat,” and wring the most shock and gore out of their R rating as possible. Blomkamp gleefully obliges. One would think watching those mercenaries pop like overripe tomatoes would tire out after like, 15 times, but it just never does.

“District 9” might be the best ’80s sci-fi movie you’re likely to see that wasn’t made in the ’80s. Made with not one recognizable star, with relatively shoestring resources, it rises above its obvious influences to be at once original, intelligent, sympathetic, accomplished and extreme. After having their big budget adaptation of “Halo” scuttled by skittish Sony execs last year, this may be the biggest middle finger to the studio system we’ve seen in decades. One can imagine that in the minds of Blomkamp and Jackson, each of those bursting soldiers very probably represent the petty money-grubbing suits that pulled the plug on their “bigger” project. Turns out, for everybody else, or at least for fans of great independent storytelling, it was the best possible course of events. As the prawns themselves might say: take that, corporate assholes.