Wikus wears a sweater vest and fumbles clipping the microphone to his lapel. The son-in-law of a private defense contracting bigwig, he’s about to go out with the camera crew as they serve eviction notices on the 1.9 million “prawns” who got lost and wound up in Johannesburg, South Africa, 20 years ago, their giant ship floating like a city in the sky, useless. He stops a soldier jogging past him and tut-tuts him for taking just over the allotted amount of ammo, hall-monitor style. We see Wikus has donned a bulletproof vest, to which he has clipped a calculator. He finds a hut of alien eggs, a nursery basically, and has it torched, giggling over the sound of the eggs popping. He bribes a young alien with cat food: “Hallo, little boy! It’s the sweetie man!” This hapless, species-ist chump is our protagonist.

That’s exactly the style of “District 9” — don’t do sci fi, or horror, or buddy comedy, or romance, or compelling drama, or even comedy the way everyone else has run those genres into the ground.

The aliens, for instance, are not sexy or cuddly like “Avatar“‘s Na’vi. They look like giant, greasy crawdads on powerful, scaly deer haunches. They growl and click and flies buzz around their Cthulu-tentacled faces. They live in tin shacks and eat raw, bad cuts of meat and trade their spectacular weaponry to Nigerian scam artists for cat food. But they have human-sized eyes, yellow and reptilian. And one of them, a father dubbed Christopher, has been working on a plan to get the ship running so his people can get the hell out of the foul District 9 reservation, where his countrymen are reduced to poorly fitting beanies and loincloths and get shot point-blank for no reason at all.

Wikus, of course, manages to bumble in and mess up said plan, spraying himself in the face with the key ingredient Christopher’s been saving up for 20 years. Whatever the stuff is, it’s not pretty. Wikus begins deteriorating. He vomits white and nosebleeds black. A fingernail rots off its bright red bed. In a scene more skin-crawling than 99 percent of horror out there, he cringes and bites another clean off. Once his handlers notice his transformation, they strap one of the alien guns — which human biology can’t interact with — to his hand and force him to shoot a “prawn,” turning it to a wet mist. Then, they decide they want to dissect him.

He manages to escape, but only to District 9, where he is reduced to eating cat food as his teeth begin to fall out. Then, he stumbles into the hut Christopher shares with his son, and the possibility of getting medical attention — if he helps the “prawns” he so reviles.

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We’re so conditioned to think of ourselves as the heroically fighting against hideous mean aliens, child saving, Tom Cruise “War of the Worlds” character in alien movies that few creators of humans meet aliens scenarios put much thought into what that would probably look like and how both sides — scared humans with home court advantage and any alien race advanced enough to build an interstellar cruiser — would act. There are probably a lot of theories about what the alien-human conflict in this movie could really refer to. Is it illegal immigration? The Holocaust? Aparteid? Forget that. It’s about how we fear things on the outside, when we are the true beasts.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.