[three-star-rating]Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley[/three-star-rating]
The future looks a lot like the past.
Neill Blomkamp – the creator behind District 9 – obviously feels he has a template for success. He’s again utilizing science fiction to explore a human problem. However, while his first flick used metaphor and curiosity to drive home messages about apartheid, Elysium is more literal and heavy-handed.
Excellent acting paired with gritty, thrilling fight sequences almost save Elysium from itself.
It’s the year 2154 (though too much of it looks like the third word today). Damon is a poor ex-con living on a polluted, overpopulated Earth. Foster is the Secretary of Defense on Elysium, a whirling, glittery space station where all the rich have fled. When our hero gets exposed to a fatal level of radiation, he has only five days to get up to the shining mansions of Elysium – and one of their cure-all Med Beds – to save his life. Evil Foster sends mercenary Copley to stop Damon and any other refugee from destroying her hoity-toity paradise.
So it’s a simple story of the haves and the have-nots – Utopia versus Dystopia – those with medical access and those without.
Damon, Copley, and Foster relish their simplistic roles, giving a lot more soul to the endeavor. Also, Blomkamp’s script makes Damon’s life vital to Foster in clever and complicated ways. Unfortunately, Blomkamp also throws in a dying kid so audiences clearly know where our sympathies should lie.
The rest of the world is just too hard to believe. Why have 1970s cars and lampshades lasted almost two centuries? Where do the overcrowded poor get their food? Wouldn’t they have turned on each other in desperation years before, a battle of survival of the fittest? How did the rich even build their escape, and how can they maintain it over the long haul? Problems are too simplified here, and the solutions the movie suggests actually make things like pollution and overpopulation worse.
[rating-key]
The idea of presenting two different worlds is intriguing visually, but here it’s a little cliché. The set dressing for the poor resembles the scary side of Sao Paolo, with an occasional flat-screen television. The rich apparently love shiny white surfaces and floating computer interfaces.
To top it off, Blomkamp couches his big message film in fairly mundane, typical hand-to-hand combat, even resorting to a samurai sword fight at one point.
I suppose I could make a joke in here about Blomkamp being South African and Canadian, since those two nationalities – Mandela meets pot-smoking gay marriage – might breed a filmmaker who’d want to use science fiction to change the world.
What I fear here, though, is that we have another Shyamalan, whose The Sixth Sense was a soaring success before ego and lack of vision led him to worse and worse films – from Signs to Unbreakable, then to The Village, and finally hitting bottom in Lady in the Water and The Happening.
Blomkamp’s new film is nowhere that bad yet, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.
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