Elysium: It’s Not So Great Up There After All

Written and Directed by Neill Blomkamp

Starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura and William Fichtner

R, 109 minutes

Science fiction and social commentary go hand in hand in many cases. In fact, great science fiction has a way of using its fictional premise and diegetic elements to comment on present day life as well as human existence in general. Elysium does this, but too much detail is paid to its desire of being social commentary disguised as an action movie that the resulting narrative doesn’t feel as strong or thorough as it could have been if a little extra elbow grease had been put on the script. It’s a shame, too, because the premise is good and the movie is entertaining enough to warrant a slight recommendation if you are a fan of the genre.

 

Matt Damon stars as Max, an ex-convict on parole in a dystopian future where the wealthy have fled a ravaged earth and live in an orbiting space station called Elysium that is devoid of sickness and crime. Meanwhile, Max and the rest of the population dwell on Earth in miserable poverty, where overpopulation is a main concern and all those who attempt to “cross the border” into Elysium are either shot down on the way or immediately deported back to Earth. When a workplace accident gives Max five days to live, he goes about ensuring passage to the space station in an attempt to cure himself of the illness. However, he soon finds himself targeted by Elysium’s Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and the sleeper Agent she hires to bring him in, Kruger (Sharlto Copley).

This world is fully realized and truly a marvel in the opening sequences, where an over-populated and smog ensconced Los Angeles is juxtaposed with shots that hover above the space station, revealing a beautiful green paradise poking through its fabricated atmosphere. The lived in feel of both worlds depicted in the picture suits it very well, further cementing writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s growing reputation as a filmmaker able to successfully project a fictional world and vision on the big screen.

On top of its aspirations to make some kind of comment on today’s world, Elysium is an action movie, and the action truly excels. Not just action, either, but shocking brutality as well in certain choice scenes. It is actually refreshing to see a movie go all-out like this with its display of violence considering the big price tag. The technology of the movie is well realized also, as shown in a sequence where Max has an exoskeleton latched onto his body through a rather cringe inducing scene that serves as the highlight of the movie (a member of the audience next to me actually broke out into a scream upon seeing a particular shot of this process).

While Elysium succeeds in portraying this less than bright future, the movie suffers when actually dealing with the characters and their motivations. The protagonist Max is no sanctimonious revolutionary as the movie begins, an aspect I quite enjoyed at first, but seeing how his character progresses through to the end doesn’t quite gel with everything that came before. Jodie Foster over-enunciates every word in her role as Delacourt and is surprisingly not given much to do as the story chugs along. From an antagonistic standpoint, most of the heavy lifting comes from Sharlto Copley as cartoonish psychopath Agent Kruger, who only seems to exist just so Matt Damon can have someone to fight in the film’s final act. The movie lacks a strong villain to complement the narrative and fully exploit everything that is at stake in the story. There is also not enough done with the characters on the space station. Not one of them rises above this stereotypical portrayal that all rich people are soulless jerks. Getting a three-dimensional perspective on at least one of these people who make up the film’s elite class would have been beneficial.

 

Running at just above 100 minutes without end credits being taken into account, the movie feels too short. With the themes the filmmaker wants to explore laid bare for us in the film’s first twenty minutes, the rest of the movie can’t follow up on many interesting nuggets of detail simply to meet this time constraint. Events seem to happen at lightning fast speeds to get the action where it needs to be so story beats are hit in time and ultimately contribute to the film’s truncation.

Due to many of these issues, the resulting message that comes along with the movie can’t help but feel undercooked. Its ending and the protagonist’s ultimate decision feels somewhat shoehorned in more so because the filmmaker wanted to express an affirmation than because the movie actually earns it. In fact, several aspects of the ending raised more questions in my head and I was left even more unsatisfied with the final product by the time I left the theater.

 

Elysium is an entertaining action movie, to be sure, but as a discourse on present day issues of economic class, healthcare, and immigration, it leaves a lot to be desired. I wouldn’t be too hard on this movie if it didn’t feel so preachy and purport to this need to be important when it succeeds much better as an action vehicle for Matt Damon. If you see Elysium in the theater, I suggest a bag of popcorn as a better prerequisite than your brain.

2.5/4

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