That provides some context for the genesis of "Star Trek Live." But what the hell is it, exactly? My first guess, while cagily inspecting a press release that's crammed with merchandising buzzwords and light on specifics, was that somebody who hadn't been reading the paper lately was following through on some three-year-old scheme to launch a "Star Trek" Broadway musical. Now, that sounds like a pop-culture disaster of heroic and delicious proportions, so I'm sorry to report it isn't happening. With discretionary spending in free fall and the recent closure of "Shrek: The Musical," Hollywood studios are backing away from the Great White Way as an ancillary revenue stream.

No, "Star Trek Live" is something else, "an interactive stage show" that's "targeted for a run in theme parks and performing arts centers across the country." The show "combines cutting-edge special effects, unmatched audience interaction and an exploration of real space-age technology," taking "audiences of all ages on an exhilarating journey with Captain James T. Kirk and Vulcan science officer Spock."

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: ZOMG! This is what Roddenberry's atheist-Apollonian vision of the future has come to! Unemployed dinner-theater actors in Kirk and Spock drag and plastic tricorders, doing a laser show for the kiddies! At Waldameer WaterWorld in Erie, Pa.! It will bear the same relationship to any actual "Star Trek" incarnation as that teeny-tiny Stonehenge in "Spinal Tap" bears to seeing Led Zeppelin play live in 1973! And you're absolutely right.

OK, OK, let me pay some lip service to journalistic fairness by reporting that "Star Trek Live," while a property of CBS Consumer Products, will actually be created by the Mad Science Group, a "science enrichment provider" that creates shows for schools, camps and other youth venues. It'll be some kind of hybridized edutainment product, in which Kirk and Spock train a fresh group of "Starfleet cadets" on their first day at the Academy. Learn, learn, learn; science, science, science. But wait, enough of that, shorty -- the Earth is under attack from unknown aliens! Put down those curly fries and shoot those bastards!

I'm not backing off my initial, bigoted assumption that this latest bastardized effort to grub a few more dollars off a canceled 1960s TV series is an idiotic debasement of the already-flaccid "Star Trek" legacy. But, hell, that's nothing new. And let's face it, fellow parents: If these people can bottle even 0.5 percent of the Trekker spirit, in a package that appeals to the science-nerd kids who are too chicken for the vomitous coaster rides, we'll all be grateful. If they can end it with a group line-dance number -- hopefully led by "Kirk" and "Spock" doing the Robot -- I take back everything I just said.

 

Sounds great, right? But there's trouble in this plastic paradise: Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent named Greer who, along with his partner, Peters (Radha Mitchell), is investigating an unusual murder case. It appears someone is bumping off the surrogates with a special weapon that simultaneously kills their human operators by -- yes! -- liquifying their brains. One of the first victims is a club kid who happens to be the son of the guy who invented surrogates in the first place (played by James Cromwell as a human and by James Francis Ginty as the younger, prettier robot version).

There's more, including a charismatic anti-surrogate activist played by Ving Rhames. And did I mention that Greer and his wife, Maggie (Rosamund Pike), have tragically lost a son? The human Maggie, frozen by grief, lies in her darkened room all day surrounded by pill bottles, while surrogate Maggie blankly and cheerfully runs a surrogate beauty parlor that looks like a Barbie's Dream House add-on, replete with bubble-shaped chairs and hot-pink see-through appliances.

Mostow doesn't treat this material as camp -- he navigates the rather absurd plot twists in a way that almost cajoles you into believing they make sense. (The screenplay is by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, adapted from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele.) But even though the picture ultimately carries a heavy-duty moral about the dehumanizing effects of machines, Mostow doesn't approach the material with deadly solemnity. For one thing, Greer's supposedly hunky surrogate, his hair coiffed in a stiff blond forelock, looks less like the young Bruce Willis than John Tesh, an obvious but witty poke at misguided vanity. It's a relief when Greer dumps the surrogate facade to reveal a guy who looks more like the real post-middle-age Willis, a scruffy, almost-regular joe with wrinkles, a trim-but-thickened torso and a nearly hairless pate. This is one of Willis' stock earnest messiah roles, but he pulls it off serviceably: Even his self-serious squint betrays the hint of a wink.

And at times "Surrogates," for all its enjoyable silliness, does veer into chilly territory. In one scene, as Greer begs Maggie to come out from behind her protective surrogate mask, to acknowledge the death of their son and get on with life, her face -- it's the bubbly surrogate face he's speaking to -- suddenly goes dead. Pike and Willis play the moment perfectly, capturing the horrifying reality of what it's like to plead with a loved one, only to realize that person has cut himself or herself off from any recognizable emotion. "Surrogates" stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.

"The Lost Room" is a puzzle series centered around an assortment of seemingly banal items and a motel room that ought to be just outside of Gallup, N.M., yet isn't. While investigating a bizarre homicide, Detective Joe Miller (Krause) stumbles into an underworld of conniving collectors and spooky zealots. Spurred on by the (somewhat proforma) disappearance of his little daughter into the metaphysically unstable room, he tangles with crusaders, hoodlums, fanatics and tycoons (including Margaret Cho, resplendent in press-on nails as a dealer working out of the back room of a dry cleaner), all chasing after the objects and some of them convinced that their quests will enable them to "know the mind of God." Part of the delight of "The Lost Room" is watching so much cosmic portent emerge from the shabby workaday noir milieu of Pittsburgh and Route 66, so I won't give away any more of the story than that. Less cryptic than David Lynch and funkier than "Lost," "The Lost Room" is in its own way more fun that either; once you're hooked, though, you'll have to content yourself with poking around on The Collectors, an ingenious fan board run by devotees of the series.

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Before giving the audience a chance to digest the slogan, it was onto another montage, this one of helicopters and explosions with 1970s music playing in the background. A preview for a Steve McQueen-themed game, I thought. Then, though, the familiar kicker: "The drones fight terrorism and protect America, and in the process, they keep the front lines unmanned," said the voiceover, adding, "This isn't science fiction; this is life in the United States Navy."

The ads preceded "The Hurt Locker" — a dramatized movie about soldiers who defuse roadside bombs in the midst of Iraq's horrifying carnage. And even with its fictionalized dialogue, the film was far more honest than the U.S. military's fantastical sales pitch. Join the armed forces, the ads suggest, and you don't have to experience the blood-and-guts consequences of combat. Instead, you get to hang out stateside, entertaining yourself with a glorified PlayStation.

During this, one of the bloodiest months in the Afghanistan war, the spots promote a somewhat comforting, if disturbingly misleading, message — and it is aimed not just at potential soldiers, but also at the public at large.

For the former, the goal is reassurance. As Bush-era attempts to conflate bellicosity and patriotism were undermined by persistent body bags, military recruitment has become more challenging. In response, the Pentagon hopes to make prospective volunteers believe their tours of duty will be as safe as a night on the couch.

For the general public, the objective is sedation. New polls show the country strongly opposes the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — but military officials want to preserve the possibility of an escalation in Afghanistan and a permanent deployment in Iraq. So along with persuading President Obama to withhold photos documenting fog-of-war brutalities at Afghanistan and Iraq prisons, the Pentagon is seeking an opiate to placate the war-averse populace. What better anodyne than a marketing campaign implying wars are fun video games?

Certainly, the ads aren't pure "science fiction." As the armed forces build more unmanned drones, Popular Science magazine reports that recruiters are indeed looking to add new remote pilots. The "science fiction" is the specific assertion that "the front lines are unmanned." Claims like that are deeply destructive, beyond their obvious insult to the thousands killed, wounded or currently stationed on those very front lines.

For instance, it's a good bet more than a few enlistees will expect their service to be happy video game tournaments, only to find themselves dodging real bullets in a Baghdad shooting gallery.

More broadly, the American psyche's slow progress toward an increasingly peaceful disposition could be stunted by the propaganda's powerful paradox: While sanitizing ads play to the country's growing disgust with militarism, they could ultimately lead us to be more supportive of militarism. How? By convincing us that violence can be just another innocuous expression of adolescent technophilia.

If we end up thinking that, we will have once again forgotten what all wars, even the justifiable ones, always are: lamentable human tragedies.

© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Jackson and Blomkamp spent several years trying to put together a film version of the Microsoft video game Halo (Blomkamp actually made three digital shorts to promote a 2007 game release). When financing for that fanboy wet dream finally fell apart, Blomkamp began working on a long-percolating idea: Take an archetypal science-fiction story -- in this case, the story of humans' first contact with extraterrestrial aliens -- and set it against the explosive social realities of contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa, his hometown. (Blomkamp's family emigrated to Canada in the late '90s.)

Amid the late-summer doldrums of studio leftovers, Blomkamp's resulting feature-film debut, "District 9," stands out as the science-fiction film of the year. (That's with all due respect to J.J. Abrams' enjoyable exercise in "Star Trek" meta-nostalgia.) Consider the fact that it was shot in South Africa without recognizable acting talent, on a budget that wouldn't furnish Michael Bay's assistant's trailer, and it might be the sci-fi surprise of this entire decade. Blomkamp cut his teeth in the entertainment industry doing digital effects for such TV series as "Stargate SG-1" and "Smallville," and, yes, there's ample technical wizardry on display. But "District 9," thankfully, is a lot more than kickass digital fight scenes. It's a grimy, consistently surprising and fundamentally human-centric science-fiction yarn, reminiscent of the dystopian, semi-realistic 1970s tradition.

Furthermore, it's a movie in which a star is born: Sharlto Copley, a friend of Blomkamp's from their teen years in Johannesburg, gives an amazing tragicomic performance as a mustachioed, second-rate Afrikaner bureaucrat named Wikus van der Merwe, who becomes -- well, let me stop myself right there. I feel the hot, stinky breath of the spoiler police, so let's just explain that Wikus is employed by MNU, a shadowy private corporation hired by the South African government to manage the increasingly unruly Johannesburg townships where a million or more insectoid aliens have been contained since their spaceship mysteriously beached itself above the city 30 years earlier.

Wikus' MNU overlord, who just happens to also be his father-in-law, has appointed him to move the increasingly undesirable and violent interlopers out of Johannesburg and into a not-so-glorified concentration camp many miles outside the city. Unsurprisingly, the removal project goes terribly awry -- and at least some of the aliens' secrets are revealed -- but along the way Wikus morphs from a smug, callous, sycophantic moron into one of the more unlikely motion-picture protagonists you'll ever see.

Both as cinema and as storytelling, "District 9" capitalizes on the uncertain boundaries between fiction and reality that characterize contemporary media, and for that matter the whole contemporary world. Blomkamp insists he's got no specific allegorical, ironic or didactic message to deliver, but one might describe the movie as overloaded with potential metaphorical meaning. It's presented as a propagandistic TV documentary about what went wrong in District 9, where Wikus -- a white representative of a black government -- went in with heavy military backup to uproot the one group in South African history to be treated worse than blacks were under the previous apartheid regime.

There's even some footage Blomkamp shot documentary-style on the streets of Johannesburg, where he walked around asking residents of various races how they would feel if aliens were settled in their overstressed, socially divided, crime-ridden city. As Blomkamp explained when I met him at the New York offices of Sony Pictures, Johannesburg -- depicted in the bleak, dry South African winter as an oppressive wasteland of shantytowns, fast food outlets, walled luxury compounds and grim government fortresses -- is both the film's main character and its reason for existing in the first place.

Neill, here you are with your debut feature film coming out, and it's produced by Peter Jackson. It's kind of an amazing situation for a first-time director.

Yeah, I'm aware of how lucky I've been. I'm in a very good position.

Are you also OK with the fact that -- I'm guessing here -- maybe 30 percent of the opening-night audience is going to think that Peter actually directed the movie?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's fine. As long as the film is good and I've done what I've wanted to do, then Hollywood is going to be open to me making more films. There's no question that Pete's name is going to draw more people to the film, and that's completely acceptable. It shines a spotlight on the whole movie.

You have this fascinating premise, where we're thrown into this world in which aliens have lived on Earth for 20 or 30 years, and they just happen to be confined to the Johannesburg townships, in a situation very reminiscent of apartheid. Talk about how your background, growing up in that time and place, influenced this story.

Well, I think there's no question that the movie is a condensation of all the elements in Joburg that had an effect on me when I was growing up. Which means it couldn't have been set anywhere else. In my mind, the film doesn't exist other than in Joburg. It was like, Johannesburg first, and "District 9" grew out of that. There are many different levels you can break it down into. From a photographic standpoint, there was what I wanted to convey about Johannesburg, which is that it's almost this burnt, nuclear wasteland, at least in winter. It really is like that.

Then there's this constant sense of an urban prison, with razor wire and electric fences and armed guards everywhere. It's a very oppressive-feeling city. I wanted to capture the essence of that, and I thought it was really cool to put science fiction in that environment. I wanted to see science fiction in that city. I mean, I lived there, and you don't come across cities like that much, especially not in the First World. They don't exist.

So that was the primary reason for making "District 9." No allegories, no metaphors, nothing. Just science fiction in Joburg. Then, as the idea began to unfold, I started to realize that actually this includes all the topics that have formed my outlook on the whole world. My upbringing in that city had a massive effect on me, and I started to realize that everything to do with segregation and apartheid, and now the new xenophobic stuff that's happening in the city, all of that dominates my mind, quite a lot of the time. Then there's the fact that science fiction is the other big part of my mind, and I started to realize that the two fit well together. There's no message, per se, that I'm trying to get across with the movie. It's rather that I want to present science fiction, and put it in the environment that affected me. In the process, maybe I highlight all the topics that interest me, but I'm not giving any answers. You can take from it what you will.

Now, you left South Africa when you were a teenager, right?

Yeah, I was around 18 when we moved to Vancouver. It was 10 years ago, or a little more than that.

So does this story take place in contemporary South Africa, or further back, closer to the apartheid era?

It's the present. It's totally the present. I've gone back every year, so it's not like I went back a decade later and was shocked by the changes. I've watched the city's gradual changes. It's more like this is an alternate reality of contemporary Joburg. In my mind, a black government is in control, and I assume that the white government -- with apartheid ending in 1994 -- did the same thing to the aliens.

Given your background in digital effects and advertising, people may expect a film that is highly technical, dominated by CGI and explosions. Now, you've got all that stuff, but the basis of the film is really a remarkable human character. You get this terrific performance from Sharlto Copley, who I guess has been your collaborator all along.

I would say he's been more my friend than my collaborator. He was interested in similar things, and he's a few years older than me. When I was coming into high school, he was leaving high school. He was closer to the film industry in South Africa than I was, and I've wanted to be in film since I was, like, zero. So when I moved to Canada we stayed in touch just because we were friends, and we were interested in the same stuff.

But Sharlto is also like Sacha Baron Cohen -- he'll just totally, relentlessly fuck with you. So I knew that if I was trying to create this realistic character, based on a lot of improv, he would be a really, really good person for that, even though he's done no acting.

He's never acted before? That's pretty amazing.

He's done a few Borat-style shows where he's just gone out and messed with people, but he hasn't actually done acting. This was a complete first for him. I filmed some test footage and showed it to Pete, and Pete said, "Clearly he's very talented," and signed off on casting him in the film, and here we are.

Sharlto plays this guy, Wikus, this Afrikaner bureaucrat who seems at first like kind of an imbecile.

Oh, he is an imbecile. [Laughter.] He is totally out of his depth.

He has been assigned to move the alien population from one ghetto to another, basically. Or, to put it more honestly, from a ghetto to a concentration camp. And it all goes wrong.

Yeah, it goes horribly wrong. Wikus is someone who is like an indirect racist, I suppose. His indirect oppression of the aliens, through being a company yes man, along with 50,000 other employees -- agreeing with everything his company does and never questioning it -- has resulted in their current situation in Johannesburg. He's comfortable with that kind of oppression, he even makes jokes about the conditions the aliens live in. Then an event happens in the film that catapults him down a path that ultimately leads him away from his peers, his friends and family. He finds himself dealing with what the aliens have been dealing with for the last 30 years, and becomes a complete outcast. The question becomes what he's going to do to rectify things, or get himself back where he was before, and that's where the compelling human element of the story comes from.

There's a very dark comic side to this story, in which blacks and whites come together to treat another group worse than blacks were ever treated under apartheid.

I was pretty aware of that. I thought that was a pretty funny concept. Another part of recent South African history that isn't world news is that the collapse of Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. So you have impoverished South African blacks, hoping for a better life in their own country, faced with an influx of millions of impoverished Zimbabweans who have come to South Africa to build a new life for their families. Now you have this powder-keg situation, with black against black, which is highly bizarre.

When we started filming the movie, we had this terrible situation where we woke up one morning to find out that Johannesburg was eating itself alive. Impoverished South Africans had started murdering impoverished Zimbabweans, necklacing them and burning them and chopping them up. That's a very serious piece of contemporary South African society that also finds its way into the film: some impoverished citizens wanting other impoverished citizens out.

There's an ingredient here that will definitely push some people's buttons. I'm talking about the way you depict these really scary Nigerian crime lords who are running things in the townships. They're violent and brutal, they're obsessed with voodoo and magic. You know, these images are pretty uncomfortable, especially for Americans who tend to be so careful in public discussions of race: Here's a white guy from South Africa making a movie with scary, murderous black African villains.

Sure, I'm totally aware of that. I know those buttons are going to be pushed. Unfortunately, that's the reality of it, and it doesn't matter how politically correct or politically incorrect you are. The bottom line is that there are huge Nigerian crime syndicates in Johannesburg. I wanted the film to feel real, to feel grounded, and I was going to incorporate as much of contemporary South Africa as I wanted to, and that's just how it is.

You're too young to have seen movies from the '70s the first time around, but I was really reminded of the gritty, social-realist sci-fi parables we used to see back then. "Soylent Green," for example, or the first few "Planet of the Apes" films.

Yeah, "Soylent Green" is really great. "Soylent Green" and "Silent Running." Yeah, totally, I love those. My actual, real favorites, though, are not the films about contemporary society but more the ones about human psychology: "Alien" and "Aliens," "Blade Runner," "2001." But, I mean, the entire spectrum of science fiction -- I'm a fan of all of it. I'm just happy participating in that environment. It's all I want to do.

"District 9" opens Aug. 14 nationwide.