The Halo, I mean, Elysium.
To set the scene, Elysium takes the classic upper class, lower class struggle narrative and gives it a decidedly sci-fi laser edge. Earth is post apocalypse, wracked with pollution, disease and crime. Elysium is a utopia in space, where rich people who look like the token American upper crust, live with technology that knows no bounds, in an unending, disease free life of parties of the Garden and Pool varieties, free from the unending squalor of Earth. Max, played by Matt Damon, grew up as an orphan on the dystopian Earth, but with one eye firmly on Elysium, was destined to mix with the wrong crowd as he grew up. A life of stealing cars, robbery and assault, sees him serving parole which is extended in the opening scenes in a scuffle with Earth-side law enforcement robots who behave alarmingly human-like. Trying to earn his keep working a line job at the local Weyland Yutani if it were operating in Detroit, Armadyne plant, he is involved in an industrial accident, that's a laughable send up of today's OHS vs. productivity at all costs culture. Dosed with a lethal amount of radiation, he is given 5 days to live, and told to have a nice day by the plant's hilariously deadpan medic-bot. There's also a sub-plot of Max's old flame Frey, played by Alice Braga doing the best with what she's got, needing her daughter to go up to Elysium to use their life-saving Medpods. This only serves to artificially heighten the stakes, as the ending renders this device largely meaningless. Having to delve into the criminal underworld again for a ticket to Elysium, Max must espionage his way up. By a confluence of circumstances he must face the shadowy might of a Secretary of Defence, Delacourt, played by a positively conniving Jodie Foster, that's planning a digital coup on the Elysium infrstructure. On top of all that, Max must literally fight through her right hand man, sleeper agent and enforcer, the excellently named Kruger, played by Sharlto Copley in a convincingly sociopathic turn, who has seemingly taken on the spirit of Koobus in District 9, eventually turning into the loose cannon and final boss fight.
Now who's the wimp...
Did you get that all? One of the main criticisms I see leveled at Elysium is that it tries to do too many things at once. And while I don't totally disagree, I don't think that it's necessarily to the detriment of the movie. As with District 9, Blomkamp has a way of weaving an intricate world with which to tell his stories. It's the rich detail that he fills these worlds with that makes his movies such excellent fare for sci-fi fans. He doesn't feel the need to explain away and justify every single piece of the world, he knows we're here to see a sci-fi movie and that there's a certain level of suspension of disbelief necessary to participate. The accessories with which he builds these worlds are also wonderfully creative and diverse, one notable example being what I would like to call the "Aperture Cutter" cycling through a square, a triangle, and finally a circle, much like one would do in a FPS game. Here, I feel the need to point out the inherent silliness of the need to cut out a triangle hole though, which I found a little jarring. It could have easily been replaced by a resizing rectangular hole before settling for the perfect circle as per the movie, but this did serve to heighten the sense of the "what is he doing... HOLY CRAP" moment, of which in this movie, there are many. But this is a minor quibble. The rate at which Blomkamp puts new plot devices into the movie and then quickly discards them helps to build an imaginative and colourful world that that aids greatly in our immersion. One place where we could do with a little less immersion though is his almost fetishistic depiction of explosive gib-filled splattery deaths, for the squeamish, you may find yourself looking away more than a few times.
Kids, look away while Uncle Matt shows this nice man how this gun works
The weakest aspect of Elysium is its social commentary on refugee situations we, as a world, face today. In Blomkamp's previous effort, in District 9, the world was built around South Africa and its slum culture. Here he decides to point the finger at America and it's the "South American in North America" illegal alien problem that Elysium is built around. Because he chooses to address America specifically, he loses the good will one would give him when he dealt with South Africa, because he isn't judging his home country anymore, as per District 9. He treads dangerous territory by singling out someone else. One can't help but feel this is a little mean spirited as America is certainly not the only country in the world to suffer from the conundrum of illegal immigrants. My own native Australia is another example, and really any poor country that is in close geographical proximity to a more developed one can have this problem. His treatment of this comes off as heavy handed, choosing to use the words "deportation", "undocumented", and the far more obvious "homeland security" choosing to call America out specifically. Delacourt's french lineage and arguably Indian President serve only as lampshades to this notion, or a possible escape clause. Not to mention the fact that all the poverty stricken earth dwellers speak and look Spanish, (Max is the only "white" person there, with the notable exception of the line supervisor, again there's a whole paragraph of racial commentary inherent in there). Because of all this you don't even get to the halfway point of the movie before thinking "Alright, I get it". Blomkamp could have taken the high road and chosen to tackle the issue on a wider scale, and made us all look at the issue in more detail, but now he is in danger of alienating the specific people he is trying to speak to, who in turn become defensive and may end up ignoring what he has to say, this is a movie after all, not a political rally.
It's a horrible world up there, down here... you know what I mean...
And finally, the biggest issue I have with the movie is the ending. Some movies just wrap up everything neatly in a little package by the end, and we as the audience appreciate it because it was a particularly appropriate way to end. In this movie however, it comes off empty and once again, mean spirited.
(Spoiler Alert)
Having multiple EMS shuttles suddenly fly down with dozens upon dozens of Medpods and Paramedic-bots, just because of a re-written line of code makes light of what would usually be the heavy subject of just why the class differences exist. As if the people on Elysium were just withholding them from the inhabitants from the Earth, when they had no use for them themselves. Why are all these shuttles even on Elysium if every inhabitant has a Medpod in their house? We have all the good stuff, we don't even need it, but you can't have it because it's ours. It's as if Blomkamp is saying the class struggle could be solved if America were to suddenly build piles of Hospitals in Southern America, because the only thing they need is free health care...
(End Spoiler Alert)
Stay calm, the undesirables have been apprehended, continue living your opulent life.
There is something poetic however in the fact that Blomkamp chose to solve the struggle between the classes in Elysium by requiring a literal reboot of the system. Very eloquent.
For all this negativity, I really did enjoy Elysium and it really is one of the more fleshed out sci-fi affairs in recent memory, it just suffers a little in trying to call out a social issue in a very specific way. Social commentary aside though, the movie is a great ride while it lasts, with a deep world filled with bizarrely diverse elements of world building, this really is excellent science fiction.
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