|
 After
the success of his debut feature, 2009’s
District 9,
one can hardly blame Neill Blomkamp for sticking to subjects close to
his heart; science fiction and human inequality. In
District 9,
he gave us a parable for the fear of the otherness of immigration in the
form of actual CGI aliens stranded on earth and treated rather badly by
humankind. In Elysium, Blomkamp again examines the politics of class
and separation with sci-fi trappings, but all the monsters here are from
much closer to home than outer space.
Max
DeCosta has never expected much. Growing up as an orphan in the slums
of a future California, there is no reason to believe there could be
anything more than what he can hold in his hands at any given time.
That is a feeling reinforced every time Max looks up at the sky and sees
a shuttle heading to the space station, Elysium, a man-made paradise,
built to house the elite of the world. On Elysium, the most wealthy and
powerful are entitled to live forever, having access to amazing
technology, including machines that can cure everything from laugh lines
to cancer. Part of the privilege of living on Elysium is in never
having to interact with or even see a lesser being again. Certainly the
idea of sharing the lifesaving pods with the have-nots, no matter how
dire their situation, would never occur. The earth they left behind is
one huge ghetto where tattooed gangs run whatever is not strictly
controlled by fascistic robot police. I guess if one is not human, one
doesn’t care much about human rights. After the orphanage, Max wandered
quite naturally into a life of crime, gaining a reputation as an
impressive thief. Attempting to leave that life of jail time behind,
he’s now a working-class dog clocking in at the factory where he
assembles the androids who regularly violate his freedom for nothing
more than trying to get to his job. It is while at this factory - with
safety conditions that would spin Sinclair Lewis in his grave - that an
accident undoes Max’s whole world. Massive exposure to radiation leaves
him five days to live and he is determined to get onto Elysium no matter
what the cost. What’s against his bid for survival is the policy of the
Elysium government to shoot down any unauthorised ships near their
airspace and hunt down any refugees that make it through. The other
complication is the mission Max is given by a local gangster that will
serve as his payment for one illegal trip to Elysium. Spider wants
technology: As the foremost refugee runner on Earth, for a very large
fee, he will attempt to shuttle the sick and dying to Elysium by hacking
into the space station’s systems to slip the ships in unnoticed. This
is only occasionally successful, and more often than not, fatal to the
passengers. To pull off the greatest hack of all, Spider needs the data
inside of the head of John Carlyle, an Elysium businessman. Max turning
up at death’s door is heaven-sent as he can be a prime guinea pig for a
high-tech exo-skeleton that will simultaneously shore up his frail body,
while making him a living external hard drive able to hijack the mogul‘s
data. However, on Elysium, that mogul’s brain is very precious to
Secretary Delacourt, whose lethally aggressive stance against the
trespassers puts her at odds with Elysium’s president, who she means to
overthrow. She needs Carlyle to achieve the coup, so when Max jumps
into action and kidnaps Carlyle’s ship and downloads the information,
she sends a team of vicious bounty hunters to save her golden goose.
Max now becomes hunted and despite the exo-skeleton, the radiation
takes its toll. He works out a deal with the mercenaries to get him to
Elysium in exchange for the data; an act that will doom the earth to an
eternity of status quo should he give it up. Will his survivor’s
instincts win out over saving the world?
Elysium is definitely a rehash of many of
District 9’s
themes of the haves and have-nots; the unfair treatment of those deemed
different from us and sacrifices made to put things right. What
District 9 had going for it that
Elysium does not is the investment in the science fiction aspect of the
story; primarily, the bug-like, extraterrestrial “prawns,” which kept a
pretty basic (though entirely worthy) morality tale from being
boring. In Elysium, the prospect of the exo-skeleton literally drilled
into Max’s bones and brain is great at first, despite its visual
clumsiness, but there’s no sort of ‘getting to know you’ sequence where
we can see what the thing can actually do. It’s suggested that it
should make Max stronger, better, faster, etc., but there’s nothing
particularly exemplary shown until the last fifteen minutes of the film,
when a bad guy gets a hold of his own mechanical spine and performs an
impossibly high jump à la 1970s kung fu movies. That’s pretty much it
for that contraption. There’s one ghastly but cool scene which shows us
what the other fantasy tech, the medical pod, can actually do when a
villain’s face is literally blown to pieces and it is reformed before
our eyes. More moments like that, though not as grotesque, would have
been appreciated. Elysium itself looks awfully flat with overlapping
palatial homes that are a gaudy mix of Beverly Hills and Lake Como.
It’s hard to get immersed in the world because everything looks very
one-dimensional. The slums of California are as convincing as the slums
Blomkamp filmed for
District 9, with the gray dust covering
everything, shanties everywhere and the unwashed poor. He could’ve
easily used the earlier film footage for stock. The ghettoes do
resemble the favelas of Rio de Janiero, but only somewhat; there are
still slightly more civilised places left, but they appear to be hanging
on by a thread. Also, instead of drawing analogies to the treatment of
blacks as was in Blomkamp’s homeland of South Africa where
District 9
took place, the writer/director makes Latinos the ‘other’ this time
around, which fits in well with the current hatred by the
anti-immigration faction in this country. A nightmare for some
ultra-right-wingers, Spanish is fluently spoken by all in this
latter-day California, but it is troubling that the power left on earth
has been usurped by Latino gangs, which also falls into racist rhetoric
in a bad way, though ostensibly no worse than the black gun runners in
D9.
Blomkamp’s return to a dystopian future is less riveting than his first
trip due to its lack of magic or new inspiration, though there are
aspects that save Elysium from being utterly unremarkable. First
would be the great cast, with Matt Damon as the beleaguered hero, Max,
whose best efforts to do right always seem to go wrong. There’s a rare
appearance by Jodie Foster, coldly terrifying as Secretary Delacourt,
the apparent love child of Dick Cheney and Margaret Thatcher. Delacourt
uses her own motherhood as an excuse to brutally execute other human
beings, including children, on the off-chance their poverty might infect
the purity of Elysium. In an
over-the-top turn, Wagner Moura is the Latino-ish data hacker,
Spider, working an accent even Ricky Ricardo couldn’t understand.
District 9
star, Sharlto Copley is the superbad bounty hunter, Kruger, who, outside
of his pervy way around a woman is really only frightening when we
realise he’s incapable of shutting up his ceaseless, high-pitched
harangues, even while being pulverised. As if specifically for my
enjoyment, Diego Luna makes a way-too-brief cameo in adorable pigtails
as Max’s old running buddy from their crimetime together.
Ultimately, the idea of Elysium is more admirable than its execution.
The struggles of the poor versus the advantages of the wealthy is ever
fodder for morality plays, and the balancing of those scales is always
grist for the cinematic mill. The sci-fi-tastic means used to even the
odds should have been more entertaining than they were, but the film
manages to balance its own iniquities and capable performances keep
Elysium from being completely forgettable.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
August
2nd, 2013
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