Gooallllllllllls

Would you continue reading this review If I began by writing that "I'm jonesing for tickets to the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg?" It reflects a true sentiment, despite the shamefully awful pun.

Granted, I'm no great association football (soccer) fan, although suffering repeated losses earlier this summer in the FIFA videogame series have definitely made me more passionate and more invested in the game than I ever have been. My slacker friends and I were even motivated to play a few clumsy pickup games in the dizzying heat of summer afternoons in Missouri.

On one occasion, two random guys entered the fray and I ended up unintentionally bloodying one of their shin's when we scuffled over a stray ball. I can't recall who ended up winning that particular game, but before we retired, I offered my own shin out to the injured fellow as a measure of consolation, of sadomasochistic fairness; some sort of testosterone-driven deferral to Hammurabi's Code. And to his credit, he was at first entirely reluctant, waving the prospect off with the kind of "aw-shucks" familiarity we Midwesterners are perpetually associated with before I finally persisted in wearing in him down with my own posturing toughness and stubbornness.

"You sure about this?" Beady eyes flicked from my gaze to my outstretched shin.
"Yeah man, you earned it."

He shook his head and muttered a few more words of what sounded like genuine concern. Then he locked his eyes onto my shin and raised his foot and I suddenly had a sickening vision of him just wailing on the bone and shattering it backwards in-half, through the skin, compound-fracture style. But I swallowed saliva and held firm. His kick proved to be startlingly pansyish (all toe) but effective; stinging pain for a moment and then I had to shake my leg out a bit and hobbled around for the next two minutes before heading home. I don't remember the guy's name, and its unlikely that I'll ever see him again, but I like to think I did us well. After all, he left the field with blood running down his leg. I hope, and I'm pretty confident, that he didn't have somewhere posh to go.

Besides revealing the disconcerting tendency of my psychology to suddenly flood my mind with gory images (a tendency that Neill Blomkamp also seems to share) the story also makes me ponder the ways in which sport, particularly football, can both create and help to mitigate conflict. Had District 9 been set in Joburg in 2010, with the World Cup in full swing, would the non-human "prawns" have been received quite so disgracefully? Or would they have been treated even worse; massacred, for instance?

Both the World Cup and District 9 are essentially about globalization. It isn't absurd to think of football as the first agent of globalization, connecting vastly diverse peoples and cultures with a single template for diversion and appreciation; 22 players, a square field, some lines, a ball, and absolutely no hands (save for goalies and throw-ins, of course). The sport has both ended and started wars, and represents the first truly free-flowing labor force.

And here is where we come to the crux of District 9, for where there are and many bodies and hearts and minds, there will always also necessarily be markets. More specifically, there will always be profiteers; people whose sole self-identified purpose in their lives to amass as much wealth, real or opportunistic, as they possibly can, consequences be damned.

The obvious villain of District 9 is one of these such people, the CEO of the scarily-realistic and appropriately vaguely-named international corporation "Multi-National United," or MNU, a kind 0f futuristic Halliburton. The "hero," if he can be called such, Wikus Van De Merwe, begins the film as a high-level operations manager for this same company. In the film's initial documentary-style footage, Wikus comes off as naive, out-of-his league, and so childishly cheerful it borders on annoying. We expect to see the alien prawns schooling him as he tries to evacuate them from their slum, and so we have a good a time when he gets barfed on and pushed around a bit.

But then, the film begins to take a much darker and more disturbing turn, even for the semi-geeky film junky who already knew the basic gimmick going-in (i.e. Aliens come to earth and we subjugate them, for a change). The film actually pulls a 28-Days Later on us, with the conflict between the non-humans and the humans taking an ancillary position to the conflict between groups of humans.

There's a brilliant moment when the principle prawn sidekick, Christopher Jones, is stuck in a holding truck between three-warring factions of humans; the MNU mercenaries, the Nigerian arms-dealers, and Wilkus himself, as an unlikely one-man army. It shouldn't be so easy to read such a complex series of expressions, from bewilderment to pity to defeated cynicism, on an insectisoid's face, but Blomkamp and company do an amazing job with the SFX, and besides, we are feeling the same things too. What Christopher is seeing in this moment is all of humanity's great potential, squandered on the most vile, selfish and self-destructive of enterprises, the fight for commodities.

Quick aside: How perfectly, deliberately ironic is it that the white male protagonist has the most interesting-sounding name in the film, while the non-human prawn has the most familiarly "Christian," especially to American viewers?

And so while the movie may make some viewers uncomfortable with its relentless, creative dissipation of the human body into a variety of mists covering the entire scale, from chunky to fine, what its irrefutably most discomforting is the recognition that we have seen this story before. All the time, in fact. It is the same story that has led us to our current ecological crisis and "clash of civilizations" Arab and Western. It is always the same story; humans find something of value and fuck it up, but it is always a blood sport to see who can fuck it up first. Damned if we don't enjoy watching it.

That final note of guilt, the one that hits after the lights have dimmed, that we have just paid to see a display of fantastical weapons, metaphorically (and most probably actively) enriching the very military-industrial complex that serves as the film's principal antagonist, well that is something that you don't often come across in your average World Cup football match.

So if football is ultimately used to stave-off and channel human conflict, and I find there is some reason to believe it does, perhaps stars like Ronaldo are worth 80 million pounds. If I can just get paid for some of this nonsense anytime soon, I'll gladly throw a few paychecks toward Joburg '10.