In 2009, director Neil Blomkamp had an unexpected hit with District 9, a rare sci-fi film that was able to achieve both critical and commercial success -- and, perhaps more impressively, do so on a modest budget. One gets the sense that any themes of xenophobia and apartheid in that film were much less important than the fact that it was incredibly profitable, and that Blomkamp was handed a blank check for his next project.
Elysium is in many ways a spiritual successor to District 9. It is bigger, badder, and arguably better. Blomkamp is a heavy-handed director and his messages border on being preachy, but this is forgivable because I feel like his heart is in the right place and his message is a good one, even if his stories and execution are a bit uneven. Elysium, to me, is primarily a story about wealth distribution, immigration, and how they affect access to healthcare, a system currently so fucked up that it would not be out of place taken as is into any piece of dystopian fiction. Blomkamp sets out to create a setting that is believable as a livable world that exists beyond mere allegory, and does so with mixed results.
In 2154, the wealthy have abandoned Earth for Elysium, a kind of utopian satellite community (think Wall-E) while the rest of us are left below to wallow in our own crapulence. Our window to life on the ground is ex-con Max Da Costa, played surprisingly well by Matt Damon. Before watching Elysium my feelings for Damon were mostly indifferent, occasionally bordering on active dislike, but he officially won me over with this performance. He seems to be an actor that gets better with age and grows into his craft. He is likeable enough to be a smart casting choice for a morally ambiguous protagonist. Here he creates an exemplary not-quite-antihero, someone we like immediately without necessarily being given a reason to, and someone we grow attached to despite much of his screen time being spent getting horrible and painful things done to him. This is the first film I've seen this summer where we get to see some of the consequences of violence -- there are no superheroes in this film beating the shit out of each other for 30 minutes straight only to get up and walk again like nothing happened (while watching Man of Steel it occasionally felt like viewing a live action Itchy & Scratchy) . Here, violence is brutal and realistic, and we wince as we watch Max go through quite a bit of it. This might sound like an odd bit of praise, but Damon does a great job of convincing us that he is actually hurt and in pain, and that's something I appreciate having been inundated and over saturated with inane cartoon violence as of late. It earns its R-rating, which is risky for a film of this scale.
Everything down below looks and feels effectively horrible. Blomkamp is well on his way to developing a signature style that works for him -- the dirt and grit of Earth do display shades of District 9's refugee camps, but not in a way that feels derivative. Blomkamp uses some clever shots and cuts to convey the harsh brutality of life below, although the camera was sometimes a bit too schizophrenic during fight sequences for my tastes. Unlike most movies of this kind there were actually moments where I felt genuine concern and nervousness during the action.
Max's life is grim and depressing even by Earth standards, and I believe his motivations for turning into the grown up version of the boy who looked up and dreamed of Elysium. There is no beautiful or iconic Luke-looking-up-at-the-suns-of-Tatooine moment here, but that's ok -- this is a very different kind of film, and one of the things I enjoyed was watching Max's motivations shift from selfish to selfless. And, surprisingly considering how clunky Blomkamp is with some of these emotion-things, it's a shift that feels organic and refreshingly devoid of moralizing.
Unfortunately, as much as Damon surprised me, I hate to say that I was disappointed by Jodie Foster. She is one of the few actresses I will follow into any film regardless of how stupid it looks, and she has never let me down before. On paper, she seemed like a perfect casting choice for the cold and calculating Delacourt, and she was the reason I had any interest in Elysium in the first place. I think Foster is a great fit for the sci-fi genre in general (her Dr. Arroway in 1997's Contact was almost as cool as Sigourney's Ripley for me) and this was supposed to be so fucking good.
It isn't, and I can't quite figure out why. She makes a fierce entrance in Suze Orman-meets-Miranda-Priestly drag and I was expecting a powerhouse performance, and instead I got to watch her spend most of the film sitting and staring at computer screens (in all fairness, the way I spend most of my time instead of doing awesome things as well) and speaking in a distracting awkward accent. Not to nitpick, but I think the accent was a big part of my problem with her performance -- it makes a lot of her line delivery seem stunted and off. She's not terrible -- she's too great of an actress to ever actually be bad -- but it was a bit of a letdown. I think she and Blomkamp share the blame here -- he seemed a little lazy about writing the character, and she seemed a little lazy about playing it. It pains me to say this, as she is one of my favorite actresses, but the weakness of the role, the bad accent, the laziness of execution, and the bad hair all meant that this character could have been played just as easily and shittily by....I can barely bring myself to type it... by Halle Berry.
I feel the need to wash my fingers after hitting those keys, but it's true. And Elysium's biggest weakness is, I think, a failure to provide Matt Damon with any truly powerful counterpoints. If Delacourt flopped as the big sci-fi villain I was wanting her to be, sleeper agent Kruger (District 9's Sharlto Copley, barely recognizable here) is slightly more effective here. Copley plays crazy very well -- throughout the course of the film we see him go from merely threatening to completely unhinged and terrifying, and although it works for what it is, I was really hoping for the film to do more with his relationship to Delacourt, as I think a more cold and calculating presence behind his complete insanity would have been effective. Likewise, I was disappointed to never get a Max-and-Delacourt confrontation of any kind.
The rest of the film's cast, unfortunately, is largely forgettable. Although Max gradually begins to fight for others rather than for his own survival, his survival is what I actually cared about. All attempts at personalizing the tragedies of those he cares for fall kind of flat -- Blompkamp seems more at home having characters fight for broader abstract concepts than for individuals. And that's okay. Elysium is a big film -- big budget, big concept, big execution, but the weakness of characterization does mar its overall impression slightly. I think Blomkamp takes too long in bringing us up to Elysium and doesn't show us enough of life up there to give us any sense of what exactly the society is that Max is about to destroy. I mentioned Wall-E as a joke earlier, but I think Pixar actually did a very good and underrated job in that film of establishing the differences between Earth and Above, and I projected a lot of those ideas onto Elysium as a setting before realizing I was doing so. It also occasionally feels like Blomkamp knows that his story of the floating society is not particularly original and has been done often enough so that he relies on us having preconceived notions about what it would entail, as he seems less interested in world building than he does about hammering his message at us. And, again, this isn't ultimately a fail, since there is a clear passion and vision behind this that I appreciate. It doesn't feel like a film that was made solely for the purpose of milking us for dollars, and that is a rare thing, particularly in the summer season.
Summer is a difficult time to be a movie with a brain. It's the high school of the film world. Years ago, I was hoping that District 9 had started a trend toward a smarter and more socially conscious kind of blockbuster, but for the most part this has not been the case. And, while occasionally we get a film that manages to strike this balance (Star Trek Into Darkness was passably smart, like a jock cramming for a C during finals. Prometheus thought it was clever enough to turn its D into an A, but didn't fool any of us) these are still few and far between. Unfortunately Elysium's lackluster opening weekend doesn't seem as if it will do much to turn the tide, proving once again that the human attention span lowers in direct correlation to the rise of outdoor temperatures, and for a film to make any money, it has to cater to the lowest common denominator, be a sequel, or have the Marvel logo attached to it (or, ideally, all three of these things). It's been a rough summer for original big budget films, and it's a shame, because Elysium is one that deserves a fair shot. It is a flawed and divisive film, for sure -- and I myself am still uncertain about whether I liked it or not -- but that in and of itself already makes it more interesting than 99% of summer mind candy. If you're a fan of sci-fi in any way, I highly recommend seeing Elysium before it gets crowded out of the theaters by other, stupider films. You may not enjoy it -- but you might enjoy not enjoying it. Rating: I don't know...B...ish?
@robrussin
