It’s the place to be.
The H-Bomb: Sometime, in what we can only hope is the very distant future, the Earth has become a contaminated cesspool of pollution and disease. The super wealthy have made a new home for themselves on Elysium, a gigantic space station complete with houses, gardens, and an atmosphere, so they can live quiet lives of comfort. As for the have-nots who make up the rest of the human race, they basically have to toil away back down on scummy, grimy, shit-hole Earth… I smell political subtext… oh dear.
One such have-not is Max (Matt Damon), a reformed criminal now working on a factory line in Los Angeles. Content on simply getting by on his meager wages, Max’s whole world is turned upside down when, due to an accident at work, he is exposed to lethal amounts of radiation that will kill him in five days time. Like any normal person, Max has a very strong desire to not die, but the only place he can find the treatment to save his life is on Elysium, where inside every home there is a magical medical pod that can cure literally every ailment known to man.
All Max has to do to be cured is find a way to get to Elysium… yeah, and all I have to do to become a multimillionaire is pull a winning lotto ticket out of my butt. In other words, getting to Elysium is no easy feat. This is due, in no small part, to Delacourt (Jodie Foster), Elysium’s homeland security chief, who is willing to use the most ruthless of tactics to ensure the sovereignty of the space station, such as shooting down any unauthorized spacecraft that come near it.
Out of sheer desperation, Max makes a deal with underworld boss Spider (Wagner Moura), who runs a line of illegal shuttles to Elysium. All Max has to do is a little job for Spider, and in return he’ll be granted safe passage to the station. Unfortunately, that “little job” is a download heist that involves stealing data that Delacourt and the rest of the Elysium elite don’t want stolen. It’s an extremely high risk job with a slim probability of success… but on the plus side, Max does get a cool, strength enhancing robotic exoskeleton out of the deal.
Naturally, the job goes predictably haywire, and Max is now a wanted man, with Delacourt’s rabid pitbull, a psychotic sleeper agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley), hot on his tail. Now, with all this going down, Max must find a way to get his ass to Elysium and into one of those magic med pods. His time is quickly running out. As far as plot goes, I’ll stop here, to avoid the risk of divulging that which I shouldn’t.
In 2009, South African writer/director Neil Blomkamp gave us District 9, an impressive feature debut that fused science fiction with social commentary, a combination that he offers up again in his bigger, and dare I say better, second film, Elysium. What impressed me so much about District 9 was how legitimately intelligent it was for a summer blockbuster. Not only were there real brains behind all the bangs and booms, but there was also real heart to it, as well.
This time, Blomkamp has managed to recapture that, as well as up the ante. It’s easy to blow things up in a film, even on a global scale, any Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich can do that. But to make us care about the people at the center of all the carnage, that takes a special kind of something extra. Here, we really become invested in Max and his arduous journey. We care when we see him injured. We care when someone very close to him dies. Even when Max acts like a selfish dick at times, we’re fully on his side. That Blomkamp cast an actor like Damon goes a long way, as he is the type who I’m predisposed to feel empathy towards. I suppose that’s all a ridiculously fancy way of saying that Damon does his typically superb job of portraying an everyman worth rooting for. It’s his effortlessly likable performance, along with Blomkamp’s earnest script, that gives Elysium its emotional heft.
Blomkamp also does a brilliant job at creating a vivid hell-on-earth where the peasants inhabit. Subbing Johannesburg for post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, he really makes the place look like a scary, terminally diseased metropolis that’s rotting from the inside out. It’s in this dust coated wasteland where the impressively imaginative, exciting, and bloody action sequences are staged. The violence is hard R and packs a sick wallop… and that’s exactly how I like it. That bit where some dude gets his face ripped off via hand grenade was truly ouch inducing.
I was surprised at how brutal it could get, especially for a big budget summer flick, but that pales in comparison to how taken aback I was by the performance of Sharlto Copley as the sociopathic super assassin, Kruger. Looking like some half-robot caveman, he is perhaps the most gleefully sadistic cinematic madman since Heath Ledger’s Joker. I’m not bullshitting you, folks, Copley is insanely funny and, far more importantly, completely frightening. He was great as the lead in District 9, but here, he is just out of this world psycho, and he walks away with the whole fucking show. See the film for him, if nothing else.
It suffices to say, I liked Elysium, a helluva lot, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have issues with it. For one thing, as fan-fucking-tastic as Copley is, Jodie Foster is a big fat nothing as the head villain. No spark, no menace, no charisma, she is stone cold boring in this role, and whatever the hell that accent was that she was attempting to do was just ridiculous. Also, I like that this is a sci-fi film with genuine ideas behind it, but the social sermonizing did get a bit heavy handed for my tastes, with an ending that seemed to be a giant, obnoxiously obvious metaphor (and shameless plug) for Obamacare. Blomkamp definitely could, and should, have dialed that back.
But, my few problems out of the way, I say Elysium is an exhilarating, slam bang science fiction flick that is smart, powerful, and emotionally gripping all the way through. It is far and away the best movie I’ve seen this summer (sorry Man of Steel), and I have a feeling it will make my list for the ten best films of the year. Blomkamp surprised everyone when District 9 was nominated for Best Picture, and now with Elysium, he may just surprise us yet again.
