A World a Little Too Much Like Ours

Elysium
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Two Stars

By Rollan Schott

The metaphors and allegory of Neill Blomkamp’s “Elysium” may just as effectively be conveyed in summary. In 2154, the earth is ‘overpopulated’ and ‘polluted’, overrun by the ‘poor’ and ‘impoverished’, while the ‘wealthy’ live on a Halo-style, Utopian space station just outside of our atmosphere, still plainly visible to those on earth. They literally live “above” the poor. A large underground market emerges to smuggle ‘undocumented’ citizens onto Elysium because of the quality of their ‘healthcare’, a sophisticated scanning bed that diagnoses and heals every ailment (this includes a man whose head is blown off by a grenade). This film is topical to the point of madness. Imagine a large, cardboard picketing sign that reads “Current Events!” rolled up tightly. Now imagine Blomkamp clubbing you with it relentlessly for 109 minutes. Hollywood liberalism is certainly not always noble.

Matt Damon in the lead role is Max, a citizen of earth who lives in a dilapidated mortar shack and had survived for some time as a formidable car thief. Now he works in a great manufacturing plant, building the ‘drones’ that serve as law enforcement officials both on Earth and Elysium, furthering a developing trend in Hollywood wherein the unemployed must settle for jobs developing the very harbinger of their inadequacy.

Following an accident at the plant involving radiation, Max is given a precariously short time to live and resolves to make it to Elysium for treatment at any cost. That’s effectively the entire story, which moves in a cumbersome, lumbering way because Blomkamp has so little material and a feature-length film to fill with it. Of course there is a girl, Frey (Alice Braga), and Max’s forthright single-mindedness and avarice betray the change of heart that will define the film’s climax. There are of course flashbacks, fleeting images of clichéd adolescence that would have been right at home in a Christopher Nolan movie.

At its heart, Elysium is an action movie, a prolonged, violent chase between the righteous fugitive and the corrupt authority in an unjust world. Having seen both his first feature, the intriguing but overrated “District 9”, and now this, I feel that Mr. Blomkamp is not a sure handed director. He struggles with tone. His presentation is inconsistent. In “District 9” he attempted a kind of pseudo-documentary/news reel approach that he elected to disregard when the action escalated.

The technique in “Elysium” is more conventional, but the same problem persists. Blomkamp is at his best when there is something to regard, rather than something with which he feels he must keep up. There seems to be a bizarre corollary between the shakiness and general incomprehensibility of the camera and the stakes of the action. An early shootout in an empty lot is staged with a much better sense of place and movement than a climactic fight in the bowels of a futuristic military compound on Elysium. Blomkamp is more effective when his characters are in a place he can admire.

“Elysium” isn't the first movie ever made to use conventional formula to serve an allegory. Hollywood made an art of the tactic during the years of the Production Code. But Blomkamp is hanging his laurels on the setup and not on the payoff. That’s why the back of the DVD cover will betray a generic film with hollow ambitions. In the end, this film is aware of our society’s shortcomings and expects that to be enough. The last twenty minutes are spent waiting for “Elysium” to return to its topical roots. Blomkamp can’t seem to tell you why he’s still swinging that rolled up sign.