Elysium Review - OR - Medicool

Plot

In the year 2154, the Earth stands on the brink of ruin. Overpopulation and pollution have decimated the planet, leading the world’s elite to build and live in the utopian space station Elysium. With no disease or worries, life on Elysium is what Max (Matt Damon) dreams of and, after being pushed to the brink of desperation, he finds himself embroiled in a plot that could change everyone’s lives, on Earth and Elysium both.

Quite why they put the mech-suit over his shirt is anyone's guess. What if he needs to dress up for a fancy dinner?

Review

To say that Neil Blomkamp ‘made an impact’ with his debut feature District 9 is like saying space is ‘kinda pretty big’. On a shoestring budget, he molded a modern sci-fi classic that addressed real issues in an honest, affecting and most importantly entertaining way.

Elysium is his follow-up feature and this time it’s healthcare caught in the crosshairs rather than apartheid and prejudice.

But unfortunately, much as the French quaffing Eloi of Elysium demonstrates, money is a corrupting illness.

There’s a lot to like in Elysium: Matt Damon’s glistening bald head falls just shy of a Natural Wonder; there’s gun porn on show that’ll put hair on your palms and make your thingy fall off, capitulated by bullets that explode into a thousand other bullets to make sure that the thing you want to kill is mince beef in the next life too; everything looks absolutely gorgeous, from the sleekly clinical orbital suburbia of Elysium to the dusty, dystopic L.A. palace of misery; resident big-bad murdering psycho Kruger (Sharlto Copley) is fantastically unsettling/weirdly comical.

And its bravery.

And this guys bravery. Those dudes don't look medically trained to me.

Because if there’s one word Elysium deserves to have stamped up-and-down its exoskeleton it’s ‘brave.’ It’s not every day, or even every decade, that a director uses his $100 million budget movie to make a political message. It’s tantamount to suicide at those heady fiscal heights (as it is indeed proving to be at the domestic box office) and Elysium’s health-care allegory is a resolute satirical middle finger to the corporate suits and political briefcases.

It makes for a film that threatens to be a contemporary breath of fresh sci-fi air on par with District 9 or Moon and yet one which stumbles just short of the finishing line. For every way in which Elysium layers on its satire, weaves a metaphor or conjures a nicely symbolic image (of which there are plenty) it shoots itself in the face (before promptly healing it up with a magic tanning bed elixir) elsewhere.

Blomkamp may be unwilling to stick to blockbuster formula, but a $100 million budget does a blockbuster make. And so, we’re left with a film rife with god-awful dialogue (why can’t anybody in Hollywood even remotely write child characters?) wearying pacing issues (it takes far far too long to actually get toElysium) and utterly vacant, largely uninteresting characters.

Don't worry guys, it's not Halo.

Damon does well as the untoward hero figure Max – even if his prime motive is quite simply ‘I want to live’ – but Max himself is a universe away from the colourful, subtly messed-up figure of District 9’s Wikus. Much worse is Jodie Fosters’ defence wizard Delacourt, who speaks both French and English in a thousand jarring accents in what may actually be a clever representation of a character who hasn’t got a clue who she is. Or who has more likely been bastardised by poor writing. Oh and don’t forget about the love interest Frey (Alice Braga)…though you probably will so screw it. At least Sharlto Copley’s on hand to save the day as the delightfully disturbed sleeper agent Kruger.

Naturally, as with anything that even remotely dices with the amorphous beast of sci-fi, Elysium suffers from the one-two cyberpunch of plot-holes and inconsistencies. There’s nothing too egregious, just the odd event that’s more ‘eh?’ than ‘cool’: shooting down a spacecraft from Earth because…the Secretary of Defence loves of bit of drama? Keeping standard healing products when every house and its shed has a machine that can fix literally anything (including melted faces) because…um, yeah I have no idea.

When Elysiumcan be bothered – and isn’t arbitrarily nauseating the audience with needless bouts of shake-tastic handy-cam – it can put on one hell of an action show. Some of Blomkamp’s camera quirks are fantastic and when the action isn’t being obscured by the aforementioned handy-cam drudgery it can be a joy to behold, full of visceral movement and sound accompanied by smartly blocked set-pieces, ranging from exoskeleton mech-suit fisticuffs to plane-baiting. If only the inevitable assault on Elysium could have been a little bit more exciting and little less tied-up-in-the-neatest-ribbon.

In Elysium, badassery is directly proportional to how much greasy metal you wear.

Verdict

Elysium is a challenging film; easy to like but hard to love, filled with all the sci-fi chicanery to be a classic but without the aplomb to pull it off. Ultimately, there’s enough brain and enough heart on show to fuel many and more post-picture bickers.

3/5

Bwaaah:

You see that little button down there, it's kind of blue and says 'like'? It's really fun to click, honest it is. Apparently, if you enjoy reading something and click on it magical things happen. Guess there's only one way to find out...

Also, be crazy and follow @Smariman. We're all friends here.