The wrong media

Rating: 4/10 (30 September 2009)

District 9 was directed by Neil Blomkamp who was originally going to direct an adaptation of Halo, the famous first person shooter video game franchise. District 9 isn't Halo, but it might as well have been. Blomkamp's film shares many storytelling elements with popular action videogames and shares their most severe weakness.
As many action or shooter gamers will admit, "gameplay is more important than story." When someone is designing a video game in either of those genres, player interactivity must be given the most resources. Many times a story is literally attached for no other reason than giving players an excuse to find a new environment. This method is employed in District 9, and is permissible only in films with no aspiration for greatness. Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor or any of Takashii Miike's films is pure entertainment. No one really cares about the artistry or intelligence involved in their production, even if the films are creatively redundant. The video game genres I've mentioned can get away with this if environments are carefully constructed and players can interact with them in many ways. Story is emphasized in other genres.
District 9 fails to impress me because it takes an idea that would have been a great video game and reconstructs it into a media that doesn't suit it. The entire movie is an obvious allegory for Apartheid, with numerous scenes of intense bloody violence. What scant storytelling occurs is formally presented and then ignored. A District 9 video game could have slowly introduced us to the protagonist (an inspector of the non-human zone District 9), and included character development when "tragedy" befalls the protagonist. He actually partially transforms into an extraterrestrial and gains their ability to use machinery. It's very similar to Prototype. Later levels of this video game would permit players to control the extraterrestrial hero the protagonist befriends.
As a film, the idea doesn't work. Because the story is so brief, Blomkamp is forced to depict too many shootouts. They become boring after the first hour. Nifty camera angles, including a first person perspective, occasionally break the tedium, but serve to remind me of what this film should have been. Summer is over and now we are finally starting to see films which people put effort into creating. District 9 is one of these films yet it is so uncomfortable that it falls into the end-of-summer blockbuster category. To my knowledge there is not yet a video game time-in to this film and that's a shame. A Syphon Filter approach would have suited this story nicely. As a film, though, I delegate it to the rent-it-and-return category so many blockbusters find themselves after their theatrical release.