Money isn’t power
Neil Blomkamp’s “Elysium”
Elysium, the new feature film from writer-director Neil Blomkamp (District 9), is a tremendous project. It commands a huge vision of dystopian sprawl, spanning not just a city or country but the entire planet. Elysium, the name given to the exclusively wealthy Stanford Torus orbiting above this future wasteland, doesn’t want for scale either: it’s large enough to house the mansions and lakes of what looks like the universe’s largest country club. Size appears to suit Blomkamp: his shots of space shuttles racing over these detailed landscapes feel like some of the film’s most confident moments.
Scale fits the film’s leads, too: in their case, it’s exoskeleton strength and force of personality that impresses. Matt Damon plays Max, who has given up his life of stealing cars to earn an honest wage manufacturing the police robots that effect the domination of Earth’s people. An accident at the factory leaves Max with only a few days to live, so he seeks out his one-time criminal associates and scores an illegal and potentially fatal ride to Elysium, where his deadly radiation sickness can be cured by an all-purpose med-bay in just thirty seconds. Damon’s desperate-confident bravado, familiar previously in the form of Jason Bourne, renders plausible Max’s acceptance of continuously heightening stakes until his mission is eventually nothing less than rescuing Earth itself.
Even more remarkable than Damon’s performance is Sharlto Copley’s as Kruger, a rough-tempered mercenary who is called in when stopping Max becomes vitally important to Elysium’s administrators. Copley lends a Terminator-like unstoppability to Kruger, who is made all the more terrifying by his clear satisfaction in the face of violence. When he takes hostage Max’s childhood sweetheart and her daughter, Copley’s Afrikaans-accented delivery of Kruger’s threats do more than anything else to put the audience on the side of Damon’s Max.
The film is at its best as Kruger and Max play cat-and-mouse above and around dusty Los Angeles. The scenes between the two of them and between Max and Spider, the local kingpin played by Wagner Moura, are driven by convincing motivations and power dynamics. Everything on Elysium, meanwhile, looks like a different and less enjoyable movie—the scenes there seem to exist primarily to mechanically prop up the action on Earth. By the time Kruger’s military shuttle crashes on Elysium with Max aboard, an unraveling is in full swing.
The problem with Elysium is that Blomkamp fails to persuade us of its power. It’s not particularly difficult to conceive of the super-rich moving to a lush space habitat as Earth becomes increasingly crowded and dirty, but in Blomkamp’s vision that station is also the site of total political and military power that acts to oppress everyone left on Earth. This would be believable if Elysium’s administrators and citizens were not so apparently weak and foolish. Max and Kruger effortlessly overpower everyone they meet on Elysium except each other, which produces a vacuum of power that’s difficult to square with the notion of totalitarian power presented back on Earth.
By doing little to characterize Elysium’s citizens as anything but boring and wealthy, the story fails to reach the status of effective or interesting social criticism. Income disparity is a worthy topic of dystopian imagination, but in a future where the world’s governments seem to have evaporated in favor of a hollow space station, it becomes plain that it is not necessarily self-justifying. Elysium simply presupposes that wealth always begets inequality and oppression: it may, but it’s not automatic, and in such a big film as this one, that frame should be earned. The film’s ending shows us that Elysium could have delivered flawless universal healthcare to Earth’s population at any time, and so it prompts an obvious question: why hadn’t they?
Elysium is technically adept, and Blomkamp has demonstrated an ability to create a believable future and place in it compelling and powerful characters like Max and Kruger. What he misses here is the roundness of the world in which they exist: the film successfully sets up the aesthetic of dystopia, but by failing to give depth to the supposed oppressors (who might have been more effectively unseen), it undoes the effects of its visual credibility. Nonetheless, it is an exciting second feature in Blomkamp’s clearly ambitious career, and there is little doubt that he has the potential to both broaden and refine his blockbuster-sized vision with time.
