Elysium begins with a flashback to a prophetic nun spouting truisms to two starry-eyed children who will grow up into Max (Matt Damon) and Frey (Alice Braga) clumsily making the usual promises of the future.
Elysium  Directed by Neill Blomkamp Starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, William Fichtner, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura |
It is not an encouraging start for Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to the inventive District 9, and it doesn’t help that the scene is set to a soundtrack of that generic female wailing that was as over-used a decade ago as thundering, brassy booms are today in the wake of Inception.
In 2154, the earth’s rich have left the planet for a space station completely free of disease and violence while the poor remain on the scrapheap below, intermittently attempting dangerous incursions to Elysium in hopes of receiving medical care.
When adult Max suffers an industrial accident that leaves him with days to live, he and his friend Julio (Diego Luna) seek help from a smuggler called Spider (Wagner Moura) to reach Elysium. Reconnecting with Frey, who works as a nurse in a hospital, Max learns she has a daughter, Matilda, who is dying of leukemia. What none knows is that they will be caught up in a struggle for control of Elysium and the power to change not just the fates of Max and Matilda, but everyone on the station and the earth below.
If Django Unchained lazily rehashed a number of its director’s ideas from his previous film, Inglourious Basterds, from violent historical revisionism in favour of racial underdogs to a certain fast-talking Christoph Waltz, here Blomkamp outdoes Tarantino in flattering himself with imitation.
Elysium spends so much time retreading familiar ground – the opportune geopolitical metaphor in a future setting, computer-generated humanoids mingling with the populace, violent paramilitary chases, mechanized exoskeletal suits, solving any and all problems with advanced assault weaponry – that it begins to feel like the B-side to District 9.
This is not thinking science fiction; it is a politicized fairytale that fails to tackle a single one of the issues that motivate the plot or its dystopian future setting in general. Instead, it milks the timely idea of “the one per cent” for every bitter drop it’s worth before going into a frenzied tailspin of blurry but unmistakably gratuitous violence.
Max is a blunt instrument of a hero whose personality amounts to wanting not to die; Damon’s signature everyman qualities are stifled by characterization that is both minimal and hollow as well as the unremitting unpleasantness of the story and world.
Jodie Foster’s woefully inconsistent accent – which combines with her frigid demeanour for a sort of frosty Madonna impression – makes her an easy target as Elysium’s absurd secretary of defense, but her cardboard cut-out is no more insubstantial than the rest of the clichés of authority and privilege (including William Fichtner as a defense contractor) who spend the film discussing the ins and outs of suppressing and controlling the earthbound 99 per cent in the various maudlin ways of unimaginative film villains.
The real antagonist is Kruger, a nearly unrecognizable Sharlto Copley as a psychopathic mercenary on the defense secretary’s payroll who rants, mumbles and cajoles in an impenetrable accent as he kills indiscriminately. His mission, needless to say, is to stop Matt Damon at all costs.
And that is why, as totally uncalled-for as it is, the climax of this movie putatively about class inequality in a future society must necessarily consist of the hero and the villain beating the stuffing out of one another in RoboCop suits.
Considered along the lines of professional wrestling – and intermittently it looks like the WWE in a Mad Max setting thanks to Blompkamp’s dusty aesthetic – Elysium offers 109 minutes of adrenaline-charged entertainment; but in this case the pulse does not reach the brain.