Take a first-time unknown director, a first-time unknown actor, and throw them in a Johannesburg slum with a $30 million “blockbuster” budget – the same amount Bruce Willis spent on a personal goatee stylist and full-length mirrors during ‘90s big budget action shoots.

Add it all up and you have the summer’s best movie. Yes, the best. Not just the most surprising, or the biggest sleeper, or the coolest sci-fi flick, or even the movie most likely to cause a stalker fan boy to stop rummaging through Jessica Alba’s trash for 112 minutes.

“District 9” is the best movie of the summer. Yes, I know, it’s completely mind-blowing. And the back story is a doozy. “Lord of the Rings” jack-of-all-everything Peter Jackson showed up in South Africa with anonymous Director Neill Blomkamp with a plan to adapt the uber-popular video game “Halo” to the big screen. But studios clashed, funding was yanked and Jackson decided to give his prodigy $30 million of his own money to make any movie he wanted. You won’t see that on “Entourage.”

Blomkamp, a South African native who now calls Vancouver home, chose to adapt a short story he had written about an alien race that intermingles with the people of Johannesburg – an interstellar metaphor for the apartheid travesties he witnessed growing up. The result is a smartly packaged faux documentary about how a mothership carrying nearly two million alien dissidents breaks down a ¼ mile above the earth, and it’s sickly inhabitants become quarantined off in sprawling city ghetto not unlike the South Africa’s real-life segregated slums.

Fast forward 30 years, and the ramshackle camp of UFO “prawns” – the derogatory slur they’re stuck with due to appearances – is being run by the Multi-National United, a unflattering hybrid of Haliburton and Blackwater. Sitting among the alien bureaucracy is chief cubicle schlep Wikus De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a short-sleeved dress shirt, clip-on tie-wearing paper pusher promoted because he married the boss’ daughter. Think Michael Scott meets Mark Fuhrman meets Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.

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In his new gig, Wikus has to enter the danger zone to evict the prawn horde, who’ve been jettisoned from “Jetsons”-esque technology to primitive squalor and a cat food diet, and send them a few kilometers down the road to tent city / concentration camp. But something quite ironic happens to Wikus – something refreshingly kept secret in the trailer.

“District 9” is a mish mash of “The Office,” “Alien Nation,” “Black Hawk Down” and “Roots.” It’s funny, scary, sad, cerebral and completely disses the blockbuster format and formula with super-sharp satire. The effects are better than “Transformers 2” (Budget: $200 million) and the cast of has-beens, never-will-be’s and CGI prawns overachieves with the help of a script stripped of clichés and cheese.

You’ve never seen a movie like “District 9,” but you’re likely to now see many more...Unless the big studio heads dispatch their own men in black with magic memory erasers.

“District 9,” rated R and checking in at 112 minutes, is now playing nationwide. Mike gives the movie 4 stars out of a possible 4.

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