Elysium sounds like one
of those drugs advertised during daytime TV: “Side effects of Elysium may
include drowsiness, bleeding of the eyes and throat, trouble making rational
decisions, gas and bloating in public places, fear of small animals and birds,
and the development of a fatal allergy to air. Consult your physician before
trying Elysium.”
Strangely enough, the movie Elysium
has some side effects, too: boredom, eye rolling, frustration, anxiety, clock
watching and sporadic armrest clawing. “Consult your movie critic before trying
Elysium.”
Groan, groan, groan …
this summer is terrible. Even the movies I sorta enjoyed — Man of Steel and Pacific Rim , for instance — I would prefer to never
see again. Don’t even get me started on the ones I hated, chiefly The Lone Ranger or Pain & Gain. As for the box office: everything is failing. Hollywood hasn’t seen
this much red since the McCarthy Era.
Elysium was the last
bastion of hope this summer. After all, its director —South African wiz kid
Neill Blomkamp — made District 9, the
underdog sci-fi movie with the big clicking cockroaches and the hulking space
ship serving as an umbrella for an entire city. District 9 was great and it made people a believer in Blomkamp’s
talent, especially since he did the movie independently and without a bajillion
dollars in studio-backed money. Our trust in his work might have been a little
misplaced, though. Now here he is with Elysium,
with lots more money and big-studio support. What could possibly go wrong?
Lots, my friend. Lots.
The film takes place in 2154, in a (more) ruined Los Angeles with a distinctly dystopian vibe,
with robotic police officers walking around harassing parole violators and line
cutters. Everyone is poor and sick and generally miserable. Water is
undrinkable, food is scarce, and employment can be attained at a cruel defense
contractor’s massive factory, where radiation ovens yawn out for human flesh.
This is where we meet Max (Matt Damon), one of those parole violators. Max is a
former car thief turned Blue Collar Joe trying to earn enough so he can rocket
off Earth to Elysium, a giant spindle-like space station orbiting Earth.
As you will quickly discover, Elysium is a heavy-handed metaphor
about class and social hierarchy. Mostly though, it’s about racial inequality. Los Angeles , filmed with
a yellow tint, is diverse and cultural. Elysium is filmed in blues and greens
and almost everyone is a creamy white, including Jodie Foster playing a defense
secretary whose whole face frosts up wickedly when she finds out trespassing
ships are approaching her elitist colony. “Oh no, Mexicans!” says the faces of
every person in the control room.
Class warfare and the growing wealth gap are great ideas for
movies, but not here and not like this. This is just silly with that giant
spinning Malibu
up in space with the Hobby Lobby floral arrangements hanging from every plastic
wall and molded contour. Even stranger is how the film switches its theme from
the expanding wealth gap to illegal immigration. It’s a subtle shift, but it
suggests that maybe Elysium doesn’t
know what it’s about. By the end, when characters are re-animated in med-pods
and citizenship can be granted by a computer worm, neither will you.
Back to Max: he hatches a plot to get on Elysium, but it involves
hacking a living brain before he himself is hacked into itty bitty pieces by
Kruger (District 9’s Sharlto Copley).
Kruger is a mercenary, and even though he has tactical nukes, chemical
railguns, homing death Frisbees, imploding hand grenades and a Jedi force field,
he still uses a samurai sword in battle. It would be like a Marine deploying to
Afghanistan
with a slingshot and some marbles, but nevermind. Damon’s Max is not without
his flourishes: after a terrible wound, Max is tricked out with a iPod dock in
his skull and a hydraulic exo-suit that screws right into his bones. He’s
hammered together in a montage that reminded me more of Ikea furniture than of
sci-fi mechsuits. By the way, if your surgeon ever tells you that “we gonna cut
you up real good, homie,” then you might need to reconsider that surgery
regardless of its importance.
The movie trailers are really playing up Damon’s exo-suit thingy,
but it’s vastly underpowered. Sometimes he’s super-strong; other times, he seems
mostly normal, but with a bunch of windshield wiper arms hanging from his body.
And just look at him: that is the one of the dopiest movie costumes since that
one Johnny Depp movie (any of them). Damon, for his part, is a good sport about
everything and he does try to work around Elysium’s
needlessly complicated action formulas. The same can’t be said for Jodie
Foster, who is just off in every way an actress can be. Foster is a great talent,
but this is some sloppy work with those uneven tones, strange stop-and-start
deliveries and that painful look on her face as she flatly speaks her sleepy
dialogue. Her character decides to start a coup and she has one of those cliché
lines with the president: “No, sir. I’m running the show now. You had your
chance.” Snore.
The crux of Elysium’s
problems is that everything it does has been done better in District 9: mech-suits, futuristic
gunfights with deadly high-powered sci-fi weapons, provocative themes involving
class warfare, hovership battles, chase sequences, Sharlto Copley … I could go on, but I’d
eventually have to re-review District 9,
which, trust me, sounds more fun. (Speaking of which, if you haven’t seen it
yet, go for it.) Elysium just fumbles
everything it lays its hands on. It has an especially hard time justifying a mother character
and her child, as well as a best friend character played by Diego Luna. These
are pointless additions that do nothing for Max and even less for Elysium.
I will say this, Elysium
is ambitious. To its detriment, though. So ambitious that it loses sight of the little
things that made Blomkamp’s previous picture so wonderful. Spectacle is nifty
and all, but if it’s attached to nothing then what’s the point?
