Elysium

Although undeniably thrilling, Neil Blomkamp’s science fiction thriller, Elysium, is a little bit of a cheat. The film doesn’t exactly deliver the incendiary goods that it promises. But, for most of its length, the picture is a well-paced, exciting, if a somewhat sentimental action film with plenty of evil villains and impressive combat scenes.
Elysium’s premise invokes a volatile combination of hot-button political issues: drone warfare intersects with anti-immigration policy and the bad guys are “homeland security.” All of this occurs in the improbable context of an allegory about universal health care. About a hundred years from now, Romney’s 47 percent who don’t pay taxes and won’t take responsibility for their lives has expanded to inherit the earth. The planet is a vast, nightmarish landfill, an endless cement-block and tar paper Gaza Strip teeming with feral unemployed mobs. Huge factories belching toxic fumes produce robo-cops built to pacify the impoverished multitudes in these colossal favelas. The wealthy bosses have emigrated to a space-station called Elysium where they enjoy uber-universal health-care in the form of machines that can magically cure all human ailments – at one point, one of these devices (they look like tanning beds) rebuilds the face of a bad guy who has “swallowed a grenade,” fixing a smoking eyeless hole in about 45 seconds. The best thing about the film is Elysium, an impeccably landscaped suburb with golf courses, fountains, and water features occupying the inside ring of the great hooped space station – this is the ultimate gated community and the images of this place are enormously impressive, particularly when the perspective shifts to show how the centrifugal force of the spinning station pastes the McMansions and country club grounds against the side of the immense rotating ring. Jodie Foster, speaking in a bizarre accent that sounds dubbed, is the evil Dick Cheney, the dominatrix Secretary of Defense, of Elysium. She specializes in blasting rickety space-barges full of desperate illegal aliens out of the air. Foster seems contemptuous of the Sci-Fi space-opera material in which she is trapped and her over-acting is grotesque but she makes a suitably vicious villain.
Matt Damon is a hapless factory worker, an ex-con, of course, with highly developed combat skills. Damon’s character is exposed to some kind of radiation that will kill him in five days, but, as thriller convention would have it, without any side-effects that might impair his ability to fight, run, leap and dash around all the while firing rocket-propelled grenades at his enemies. Damon ends up carting his girlfriend’s daughter to Elysium in order to cure her leukemia and the film is operatically sentimental about his heroic character, the nurse that once loved him, and the poor, sick little waif. There is subplot about “re-booting’ the space station to allow universal health care for all the planet’s “huddled sick and poor” and much spectacular violence. After setting-up the plot, the film becomes a violent chase. From an action standpoint, the movie climaxes in a spectacular fire-fight on what seems to be an airport runway about half-way through the picture. After that sequence, the movie gets increasingly loud and absurd. People are suited-up as cyborgs in bionic gear (gorily inserted into them with lots of surgical close-ups) and a great deal of giant robot fisticuffs ensues – much of this action is derivative and unsatisfying.
The film’s structure and design is familiar – the movie essentially recapitulates many plot and design elements of Fritz Lang’s great Metropolis. The German director’s gleaming skyscraper city with its teeming worker barracks buried deep below alabaster towers and sparkling athletic facilities is functionally identical to Elysium spinning through space above the desolate, polluted garbage heap where its laborers swarm like so many insects. Films of this sort, made by very rich and privileged directors, often have an incongruously revolutionary theme – this phenomenon dates back to Griffith’s French revolution melodrama Orphans of the Storm in 1921. Class warfare of the most obvious and brutal sort animates these films and are their raison d’etre. Metropolis reaches its titanic climax when the mob of workers rises from the underground, attacks the skyscraper city in an orgy of destruction led by a seductively demonic robot-witch – all this happening while a flood threatens to drown their children in caverns far below. Elysium is designed to deliver a similar climax: we anticipate the workers trapped on the barrios of the rotting Earth will attack the space-station, run amuck in its gardens and mansions, and savage its inhabitants. We have been prepared for this by several early scenes showing illegal immigrants crash-landing on the space-station and attacked by Elysium’s security guards. But Elysium runs out of money, or loses its nerve, the apocalyptic assault on the space-station never occurs. With a stroke on the keyboard, everyone becomes nice; fraternity overcomes socio-economic distinctions and the life-dispensing bio-stations offering eternal disease-free life are sent to Earth so that everyone can be treated what ails them. The film doesn’t exactly end with the handshake between labor and management that concludes Metropolis, but it’s close.
Notwithstanding my reservations, Elysium is well-made and exciting, a summer action film that I can recommend.