Elysium (2013)

If we know one thing about Neill Blomkamp through two films, it’s that he loves a good allegory. His first feature, District 9, was both a thrilling, violent science-fiction film that mixed breathless action with commentary about apartheid and mankind’s treatment of the Other. However, the film helped itself by not getting too bogged down in all that symbolic nonsense, though it’s certainly present. Ultimately Blomkamp’s goal was to make it a bloody good time, and he succeeded. With his new film Elysium, Blomkamp has doubled down on his political ambitions, and the result is a killer premise that is ultimately squandered by odd decisions, an undercooked plot, and inconsistent action direction. It has the same soul as its predecessor, and it looks gorgeous, but Elysium feels like the outline of a good movie that still doesn’t have all the details figured out.

It is the year 2154, and the Earth is polluted and overpopulated. The wealthy have built a space station called Elysium, and they all live happily there while the poor suffer on the planet they left behind. Max DeCosta (Matt Damon) is one such impoverished person, though he constantly dreams of moving up to the great big paradise in the sky. Considering he’s an ex-convict working a low-paying job at a factory, that's unlikely to ever happen. After an accident pushes him to the verge of death, he and his cohorts Julio (Diego Luna) and Spider (Wagner Moura) hatch a plan that could put the power of Elysium in their hands. First they just have to go through the ruthless businessman John Carlyle (William Fichtner), a bloodthirsty “asset” named Kruger (Sharlto Copley) and the villainous Secretary of Defense (Jodie Foster).

Considering what Blomkamp did with a much smaller budget on District 9, it’s no surprise that Elysium looks fantastic right from the outset. It’s a rather plausible universe he’s created from a visual standpoint, but just about every other aspect of his world isn’t that convincing. Whenever a character does something it might make superficial sense, but the movie absolutely falls apart the second you start to think about… well, anything. The ultimate plan formulated by Max, Julio and Spider sounds admirable at first, but it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. Really, the film’s greatest sin is that nothing is explained. It zips from plot point to plot point without much regard for giving each moment any depth. Foster’s character in particular seems like someone who might exist, but in the universe of Elysium she only exists to do what the script asks her to do. None of the characters in this movie are fleshed out to a satisfactory degree, and as a result the world starts to feel less and less authentic. Everything is controlled by Blomkamp’s storytelling agenda, and it starts to become artificial real fast.

One of the film’s greatest crimes is that the audience never really gets a good sense of Elysium as a place. Some early sequences give us a superficial look, but that’s really the extent of it. We see how it’s run by crazy politicians, and we see how bad life is on Earth, but we never really get to see people just exist there. A more interesting—and subtler—movie might have had its characters successfully infiltrate the habitat and try to live under the radar. Instead, most of the times we see Elysium itself we also wind up seeing a lot of things blow up. It looks like paradise, but none of the characters ever get to experience paradise.

Elysium is also a slight regression in the realm of action direction for Blomkamp, who delivered some killer sequences in District 9. He’s able to conjure up some fascinating images and shots here and there, but too often the editing is incomprehensible and the camera tricks seem like flashiness for its own sake. There’s no real visual identity to the action in this movie. It’s just whatever Blomkamp feels like doing at any given moment. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: Blomkamp became so preoccupied with what he could do that he forgot to think about what he should do. Many of the action sequences lack any sense of flow, and it just speaks to the film’s inability to form a cohesive whole.

There are also some missteps on the performance front, though everyone involved has obviously been very good in other things. I will always worship Matt Damon in this life and the next, but I think this is a rare case of him being miscast. He is so charismatic and likable that it seems to be at odds with the character of Max, who’s supposed to be rougher around the edges. Damon is a heck of an action hero (see: the films Bourne) but in between all the shooting and running this role constantly feels like an odd fit. Though maybe that’s just the fault of Blomkamp for not giving Damon more to chew on. I may be in the minority on this next one, but I also felt Sharlto Copley’s performance here did not work well at all. Kruger is a hairy mountain man of an assassin, but Copley decides to go the full crazy with it and most of the menace disappears in the process. He has the potential to be a great antagonist, but perhaps in a dressed-up Bond villain sort of way. In Elysium he’s mostly reaching for something that’s not there. Jodie Foster fares best, though even her voice could probably have been toned down a bit.

Most would agree that District 9 was a breathless movie, but it was able to successfully balance the nonstop chaos with the emotional arc of its protagonist. There was always forward momentum on both fronts. Elysium is not nearly as successful at this. Whenever the action happens, it feels like the plot comes to a halt, and whenever the plot moves forward it’s usually done quite carelessly. This also winds up making Blomkamp’s political themes a bit too blatant at times, and it eventually gets to the point where the audience is being alternately barraged by action and ideas. Obviously, ideas are not an inherently bad thing. I’d prefer to see more semi-ambitious failures like this. It’s just that Elysium is not particularly successful at integrating the ideas, the plot and the action. Blomkamp’s unique voice and style are still on display, but this is a battering ram of a movie that could have been constructed with a lot more care.

Grade: C