Movie Review: Elysium

Elysium is the latest science fiction action picture from director Neill Blomkamp, the South African director who made his mark in 2009 with District 9. 

The year is 2154, and everyone on earth lives in abject poverty in slums ridden with disease. The wealthiest people live on Elysium, a utopian space habitat that's reminiscent of Larry Niven's Ringworld. The people on Elysium can live forever: medicine has advanced to such a degree that even the worst injury or disease can be cured by a few minutes in a machine that can rebuild broken bones and repair ripped flesh, or rewrite the DNA in your very bones.

Elysium follows Max (played by Matt Damon), a Spanish/English-speaking former car thief who lives in LA working in a factory that manufactures the droids that police the human populace. Max's childhood friend, Frey (played by Alice Braga), goes off to become a nurse but by chance she meets Max again after he mouths off to the wrong droid. When Max is fatally exposed to radiation at work, his only hope is to get medical attention on Elysium.

Jodie Foster plays Delacourt, the French-speaking defense minister of Elysium. She is ruthless, ordering the sleeper agent Kruger (played quite malevolently by Sharlto Copley) to shoot down shuttles carrying sick children illegally into Elysium for medical care. If you think of earth as Mexico (the slum scenes were shot there), space as the Rio Grande and Elysium as the United States you get the picture.

In order to have the strength to fight his way to Elysium Max agrees to have a powered exoskeleton screwed into his spine and skull, and electronics implanted in his brain. In addition to the grit, there's plenty of action in Elysium: spaceships, guns, katana-skewerings, robot dismemberment, hand-to-hand combat, explosions and crashes.

While District 9 was a not-so-subtle comment on the apartheid era in South Africa, Elysium is an equally unsubtle statement on illegal immigration, the wealthiest 1% and the absence of health care for the poorest among us. This is nothing new for the movies: since the very beginning, film has been a medium that caters to the masses, protesting the injustices of inequality that pervade society. From It's a Wonderful Life to Star Wars the triumph of the little guy over entrenched wealth and power has been an ever-present theme.

In the world of Elysium the denial of health care to the masses seems especially heartless because the cure is so cheap and so easy. But we have much the same issue here today: procedures such as knee and hip implants in the United States cost 10 times more than in Belgium, which means many Americans are denied medical care because medical device manufacturers and health care providers artificially jack up prices.

Movies with messages can still be effective as art and entertainment as long as the preaching doesn't hit you over the head. Elysium avoids that trap. If Elysium lacks something, it was a sufficiently tight connection between Max and Frey's daughter, Matilda. Damon's performance doesn't convince me -- all the groundwork was laid, but it lacked emotional impact.

As usual, I have quibbles with technical aspects of the film. The computerized McGuffin is bogus: everyone can instantly recognize what the thing can do -- you'd think the bad guys would name their files something other than "Program to Take Over the World." Also, it's too easy for the illegals to enter Elysium: they can simply fly in because the inside of the ring is open to space. Niven's Ringworld was large enough, spun fast enough and had high enough walls to keep the atmosphere in (it was 180 million miles across). Elysium is just too small -- it would have to be completely sealed to keep the air in and cosmic rays out, but that would make it too hard for illegals to fly in and get a quick cure, removing a major plot point.

Blomkamp still has it in for his native South Africa: Kruger and his bloodthirsty thugs are Afrikaners, even sporting a South African flag on their spacecraft if you missed Kruger's accent. His namesake, Paul Kruger, was the face of the Boer Resistance against the British during the Second Boer War, and the Krugerrand was named after him.