>> Still, I can't imagine a major film having you switch sides in an
>> imperial war. Game artists can do things other genres just can't.
>
> _Total Recall_, starring the future Governor of California?
Ah, but look a little closer and "Total Recall" proves my point. The guerillas are slaughtered, and the gender-bending resistance leader who is, literally and figuratively, pregnant with the future is killed off, leaving the mandatory heterosexual couple to triumph on a re-oxygenated Mars which looks suspiciously like central California. It's a restaging of the Texas war of independence or the US colonial war on Mexico - in the end, Mars isn't freed, it's McMansioned.
There are a few counter-examples, of course - Carpenter's "They Live" comes to mind - but the thing is, film narratives almost never explicitly mark their villains as agents of the US Empire. Half Life does that, and literally stages its story within the infrastructures of the US national security state.
-- DRR