Review #20: Elysium
If the elite 1% left Earth for a luxurious space station…
“I promise you — one day, I’ll take you to Elysium.” -Max Da Costa
Synopsis
By the mid 22nd century, Earth’s population has become divided — the wealthy 1% reside on an opulent space doughnut called Elysium, while the people of Earth are ravaged by disease, ruin, overpopulation, and Matt Damon shaking kids upside down by the legs for money. When he’s not doing that, he works as a laborer for a weapons company called Armadyne, whose sole purpose, now that I think about it, is to produce weapons to use against the people of Earth. In the awful workplace conditions at Armadyne which surely should lead to some class action lawsuits, Max (Damon) is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation and given 5 days to live. Desperate to be cured, Max seeks help from Spider: a local human smuggler who has become an expert at sneaking people onto Elysium, where there is always an auto-medical bed within walking distance for some reason. Spider agrees to help him under the condition that he steal some damning BrAiN information from John Carlyle, the corrupt CEO of Armadyne. With nothing left to lose but his gray T-shirt, Max agrees to have his body integrated into a mechanical exoskeleton to carry out the mission.
The assault on the Armadyne CEO is successful, but comes at great cost when an Elysium agent, Kruger, is sent to thwart Max’s plan, killing everyone else on Max’s team. Injured, he seeks help from an old crush, Frey. Since Frey is a doctor, she of course has all the medical equipment necessary to treat him right in her house. He also meets her daughter, who has been diagnosed with cancer and has little time left to live. He then returns to Spider with the BrAiN information, who tells him that, with the data in his head, they can “reboot the Elysium computer core” to make all people of Earth valid citizens of Elysium. With a flight lockdown in place, Max’s only way to get to Elysium is to trick Kruger into believing he has surrendered, but he doesn’t realize Kruger has apprehended Frey and her daughter to make sure he doesn’t try any funny business on the ship. Funny business ensues, and Max takes down the ship on Elysium soil without injuring Frey or her daughter. He then battles a bunch of bad dudes, kills Kruger, and reboots the computer core, sacrificing himself so that everyone can receive aid from Elysium’s medical services! Oh crap, now everyone is poor…
Review
When director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his premier project, District 9, to theaters in 2009, sci-fi fans were blown away by the unique dystopian aesthetic and hauntingly conscious story. When it was announced that Blomkamp was returning with a sophomore hit in 2012 (later delayed to 2013 because they didn’t want to compete with Oz the Great and Powerful haha), the sci-fi community was overjoyed; Finally, there was a modern sci-fi director on the scene who could compete with the grand, big box style of James Cameron, the mind-bending style of Christopher Nolan, and the blast-to-the-past style of JJ Abrams. Elysium certainly doesn’t fail in delivering a return to the unique themes and settings first seen in District 9, but a slew of minor plot deficiencies slowly take nibbles out of the integrity of the film until, by the ending, you hardly care about the unspoken aftermath of the resolution. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Elysium opens with some astonishing views of the ring-shaped space station, which are no doubt a Hollywood depiction of NASA’s Stanford Torus, and may even elicit faint memories of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Elysium is covered in lush lawns, lavish houses, and beautiful scenery. This pristine setting is a very purposeful juxtaposition to what we see on Earth; a world filled with cramped, run-down houses, and citizens in dirty, tattered clothes. Here is where we meet Max Da Costa, which is such a bruh name it makes the name “Matt Damon” sound like the name of an Ivy League scholar. While working at Armadyne, Max becomes trapped in some sort of radioactive oven, the purpose of which is beyond me. He is doused in lethal levels of radiation, despite the fact that the oven literally recognizes that there is “organic material” inside and issues a series of alerts and warnings, but apparently can’t just shut off. The following scenes featuring Carlyle and the medical staff deciding what to do with him are perhaps some of the most stark and powerful of the film. There is one scene in particular where a manager is explaining to Carlyle what happened, and Carlyle interrupts him to say “don’t breathe on me!” In the end, a robot deposits a bottle of pain pills next to Max, and they throw him out into the streets.
The film then takes a departure from Max’s story to show the audience four ships attempting to illegally transport ill and injured Earth citizens to Elysium for medical treatment. In this act, we get to meet Elysium’s Defense Secretary, Jessica Delacourt, and secret agent Kruger, the former of whom orders the latter to shoot down the trespassing vessels. Kruger, located on Earth, unlocks his high-tech van to retrieve an Earth-to-space missile launcher and does little more than point it skyward and click ‘fire’. Besides the fact that I was expecting Elysium to have some of her own defensive weaponry, this scene was weird for a lot of reasons. Why did Kruger have to do this from Earth? Couldn’t someone from Elysium have done this even easier? And why are we departing so far from Max at the climax of his story? The movie wants these dictator-style antagonists to be directly involved in Max’s plot so badly, but knows that it can’t relate them a lower class laborer from Earth without introducing them in a completely separate event. This tears the story into two distinct, unrelated plots, adding a particular clunkiness that persists through the remainder of the film. Regardless of all this, the scene is pretty cool looking, and delivers very strong portrayals of the film’s themes of social class and immigration.
Back on Earth, Max seeks help from Spider, whose hideout has more strobes than a 2000’s rave club. He agrees to Spider’s plan to steal sensitive business information from Carlyle’s mind. The whole ‘brain download’ aspect of the plot is badass and unique, and caused my eyebrows to raise considerably upon watching. They integrate Max into the mech suit with some garage tools and these ridiculous metal bolts that would kill anyone besides Matt Damon, then set their plan in action. The battle scene here involving Carlyle, Kruger, the robots from Chappie, and Max’s band of misfits is pretty well choreographed and directed (complete with more lens flares!), but you sort of forget the movie is rated R until this point. Elysium probably could have easily been a PG-13 movie by just removing 2 or 3 scenes of people exploding, and strategically substituting the word “fudge” where necessary. An aside: Delacourt watches this whole battle unfold in high-def from Elysium, which again makes me wonder why Kruger’s character even exists besides adding conflict on Earth. If Elysium can video and scan people from orbit, why can’t they just shoot a missile at Max or something?
Kruger’s character finally becomes useful and interesting when they are forced to use him as a transport to Elysium to activate the program they found in Carlyle’s head. Here we finally get to see how dark and evil of a person Kruger is, almost over-the-top evil. He has taken Frey and her daughter hostage at this point, so Max has to engage in a very surgical fight in order to keep Frey safe while beating up Kruger… ope he used grenades, nevermind. There is a nasty scene here where we get to see a close-up of a grenade exploding Kruger’s face, again departing from the largely PG-13 feel of the rest of the film. Upon crashing on Elysium, Max infiltrates the ranks while the bad guys retrieve Kruger and “reconstruct” him using one of the Med-Bays. On top of being cinematically incredible, this scene is also great because it gives the audience a firm grasp of the power of Elysian medical technology, and why the people of Earth have been fighting so badly to gain access to it. Anyways, Kruger, integrated into his own new mech suit and bent on revenge, has another noteworthy standoff against Max at the end of the film.
The film’s ending is a sort-of pseudo feel good ending. While we get to see Frey’s daughter cured of cancer, and the robots of Elysium now recognizing the people of Earth as citizens that need medical care, a lot of questions remain:
- Would it not be easy for someone else to just reboot the computer again quick, and reset the citizenship status to members of Elysium?
- Does Elysium really have enough medical resources to help everyone on Earth? If so, Elysians are dicks. If not, doesn’t that just make everyone effed?
- Will Max be buried in that same grey T-shirt he wore throughout the whole film?! Only time will tell…
Conclusion
Despite really powerful themes and gripping cinematography, Elysium struggles to lift itself into orbit weighed down by its clunky, dense plot. Still, the film rides enough in the wake of its predecessor’s filmmaking aesthetic that it is worthy of a watch by both elite sci-fi fans and commoners alike.
