Why District 9 is like a videogame, and why it says more about apartheid than you think (Spoilers)

I called District 9 a movie “made by gamers and for gamers,” a statement made with the knowledge that director Neill Blomkamp had been tapped previously to make the movie version of Halo. Still, when N’Gai said he “didn’t see it,” it stuck in my craw. To me, District 9 shows how heavily games and movies have merged into the same shared milieu. Beyond the visual and emotional space cribbed by Children of Men before, District 9 isn’t just sharing a vision of the future explored previously in videogames (specifically Half-Life 2, with its mix of old world architecture, brown-note-emitting crystalline monoliths, and benevolent insectoid bipedal aliens [hat tip]) but modeled its protagonist’s progression on that of a typical videogame hero.

In mostly serious example (and here be spoilers):

• Hero promoted with no prior qualifications
• Starts mission by killing dozens of harmless baby enemies
• Co-op partner unlocks “First Abortion” achievement and badge
• Levels up with alien superpowers
• Fights generic quasi-military enemies who are awful shots
• Trained in heavily scripted sequence to use a series of alien weapons of increasing lethality
• Pilots a complicated mechanized power suit with only seconds of training
• Ends up spending the rest of his life crafting items

There’s more to it than simple coincidence.

One of the main criticisms I’ve heard of the film this weekend is that it didn’t fully address the issue of apartheid, perhaps using it (at worst) as window dressing. I’ve of the “pop art should pop first” school, but I think some of the vagueness of the issue was also intentional, especially how a single line—something along the lines of “the workers freed from the ship were mostly dumb drones”—has provoked a weekend’s worth of conversations with Carmela and online about why the aliens did not rise up against the humans, if Christopher Johnson (no relation) was part of a more intelligent, princely caste, and other issues of class and power and intelligence.

I wrote this on a gaming forum:

I am starting to suspect that the intimations about the worker class prawns and whether or not Christopher is one were specifically written with a lighter hand to provoke the very conversation about intelligence, apartheid, and slums that we’re having. (And that I’ve been having with my girlfriend since Friday.)

I think that’s why I didn’t at first understand the complaints about the apartheid story being underserved by the movie itself. (I’ve typed “apartheid” more in the last weekend than I have in the last decade. That counts for something, right?) I can’t help but think that if they’d spent more time on it than they did that it would have become tedious — or worse, simply a statement of opinion, rather than provoker. I’d rather a thinking man’s Halo than, say, Enemy Mine. It might not be as “important” or as well regarded in twenty years’ time (my girlfriend’s main complaint), and maybe my teenage testicles are still showing, but I still like my alien movies to have some explosions and mech suits.

Besides, violence is much of the message! If there were no MNU to keep the prawns in the slum with the threat of violence, there would have been no problem at all.