There’s no extra credit for “lip service.” Good intentions will only take you so far, as Neill Blomkamp is about to experience with the feedback for Elysium. This new science fiction picture is big, brassy, often exciting and absolutely gorgeous to look at. It also, unfortunately, considers itself political. And sadly, those politics are laughable. But let’s start grading on a curve: Elysium isn’t based on a comic book or young adult novel and is comfortably, non-gratuitously, rated-R. Small wonders that are enough to separate this film from the pack of this summer’s uninspired, over-familiar drivel.
Matt Damon, still sporting those Jason Bourne abs because you never know, is Max, former career criminal and current clock-puncher. It’s 2154 where Los Angeles, not looking very different from Detroit 2013, has turned into something of a Third World country with garbage littering the streets and people hovering in shanties. Max is just trying to get by, taking public transportation to a menial job every morning where he programs machines to build robots for the One Percent. This is another one of those jobs where our hero labors among faceless grunts overseen by a single man in a suit and tie that just hangs out in his office, but Blomkamp looks past this cliché to create a believable workaday atmosphere. The conditions are unsafe, the pay is low and Max is expendable, but details like the ratty wardrobe and the scuff on each machine (this is either a very real, very depressing factory, or incredible CGI) settle the viewer. It’s busy and uncomfortable, and you could never be paid enough to withstand the area for more than ten minutes.
During one thankless shift, Max is accidentally trapped inside a machine, experiencing a lethal dose of radiation that gives him five days to live. In lieu of a doctor, the woozy victim is instead briefed by a robot who outlines his conditions dispassionately; he is barely conscious when the drone callously soft-tosses a bottle of pills against his forehead. With his drained life, Max instead opts to think big; he’s going to Elysium.
In a design lifted casually from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Elysium is an oval-shaped space station orbiting the Earth, one that recreates a clean, healthy Earth lifestyle for its wealthy inhabitants. Like District 9, Blomkamp creates a world where unchecked bureaucracy results in inhospitable conditions for the lower class, but this time an increased budget lets him show us how the other half lives. In this case, the fashion is fairly progressive, the language is frequently French when it’s not plain English and humans are basically immortal. Elysium holds the promise of universal health care for the wealthy thanks to plot-convenient healing machines that can diagnose and fix any disease within seconds.
Max’s journey takes him through the black market, where he must be granted fake citizenship in order to qualify for use under this system. He must also secure a spaceship, one that can navigate the lasers from Elysium’s space border patrol, and that will involve doing a favor for old criminal buddy Spider (Wagner Moura, from the superb Elite Squad movies). The idea of Max bogarting a spaceship with illegal citizenship to crash a highly political system specifically for selfish, but understandable means is a ripe place to take this film; one that also offers simple goals and tasks for a streamlined narrative. Once Spider drops a robotic power-up onto the table for Max to use, it becomes something else: strictly video game plotting.
This power-up is a gawky exo-skeleton, one that presumably will keep Max from passing out due to radiation, but also granting him meta-human strength. It’s never explained how this works, where it came from, or how it’s essentially lying around a favela, waiting for the moment a Hispanic cast will glue it to the back of an honorable gringo. To its amusing credit, this device never looks comfortable on Damon, representing exactly what it is: a trendy super space blockbuster weapon glued onto a would-be award-nominated actor, one who actually just starred in an all-American David-and-Goliath story about fracking of all things. With this exo-skeleton comes the slow free-fall into point-and-click storytelling, portraying two films at war with each other.
The ingenuity, intelligence and flair that showed Blomkamp to be resourceful in District 9 shows up when Sharlto Copley plays a renegade black-ops agent named Krueger, activated like a weapon to snuff out non-citizen threats to Elysium. Of course, it makes zero sense to utilize a character like this on Earth so that he can fire handheld rockets into space to eliminate targets. But the idea of a rogue soldier living amongst the ruins, grilling chicken with a sword (!), is a ripe-enough genre concept that both Copley and Blomkamp have a certain amount of fun with it. He’s ruthless and unpleasant, and possibly unhygienic. When he captures Max’s childhood sweetheart Frey (Alice Braga, thankless), in an entirely convoluted damsel-in-distress scenario, his unhinged anger is mixed with a warped fantasy of being domesticated, of finding a girl to take him away from all this violence, and possibly to kiss. Rightfully, his character evolves to the point where he begins to second-guess his mission. Why this results in him becoming an even more dangerous and unpredictable enemy for Max, destroying everything in his path while yelling twentieth century catchphrases, makes little sense other than paying off a white-hat- black-hat set-up.
Not characteristic of Blomkamp are the brief flashbacks, one that illustrate Max’s childhood relationship with a nun who drops some expositional dialogue that emphasizes, “Chosen one. Destiny. You know the drill, guys.” It’s not enough that Max be just a guy trying to stay alive: He has to be a figurehead for a rebellion, an opportunity to overthrow a corrupt system due to a fluke encounter with a leader of industry played by William Fichtner. These plot strands lead up to an overall message that everyone should have universal health care and that the rich should not criminalize immigrants. What incisive, educated insights.
This is personified through Jodie Foster’s ice-queen secretary of defense Delacourt, a tough-talking higher-up on Elysium whom we know to hate because of her outlandish sometimes-German, sometimes-British accent. She’s the only one who doesn’t seem very broken-up when ships filled with illegals explode in space; perhaps coincidentally, she’s the smartest dresser in a film that suggests, one hundred and forty years in the future, the poor will still wear t-shirts and blue jeans. Foster is terrible in this part, which isn’t very noticeable until the realization sets in that she’s entirely irrelevant to the plot, just a random boo-hiss baddie to put a face to a future that marginalizes minorities, plus the guy from Rounders.
She’s the only resident on Elysium that has any identity, an easy way to stack the deck, particularly considering the film only shows a couple acres of land on this space station. Is it all blue pools and green grass? What sports do they play there? Is it an all-around dinner party? What gods are worshipped and what holidays are observed? Schools? Such dimension is beyond Elysium, which wants to level the playing field simply by depicting minorities and the lower class as inherently good people. Who also commit crime, live in squalor, and shoot others. Balancing these embarrassingly broad politics in this film clearly wasn’t a priority, but guaranteed that by the time you leave the theater, you’ll know the ins-and-outs of how Krueger’s sword also works as an awesome electromagnetic shield. They’re making movies where swords have more personality than the characters. Maybe living on a space station away from where they make movies like this is a good idea.
Den of Geek Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars
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Ouch.