MOVI ES
BY MO LLY TEMP LETO N
ALL FUTURE, NO VISION
Director Neill Blomkamp’s heavy hand flattens Elysium
ELYSIUM: Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. Cinematography,
tell us who we are by imagining where we might be going.
Elysium, on the other hand, is here to tell us where we
are by telling us where we are — just with shinier toys and
a more drastic divide between the privileged and everyone
else. In 2154, the wealthy have left an overpopulated
Earth, retreating to a glittering space station where there is
no sickness and everyone appears to live in grandiose
mansions with lake-sized swimming pools and robot
servants. Back at home, the rest of us scramble to survive.
Part of the problem with Elysium is that writer-director
Neill Blomkamp (District 9) takes everything to such
dramatic extremes that there is no time to consider or
Trent, Opaloch. Editing, Julian Clarke and Lee Smith. Music, Ryan Amon.
Starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Alice Braga and Sharlto Copley.
Sony Pictures, 2013. R. 109 minutes. 44266
S
cience fiction, contrary to what its frequently
fluffy appearances at the multiplex might lead
you to believe, is a brilliant medium for ideas.
You can invent anything: a starfleet based on
equality, a future destroyed by robots, a world of
passively invading alien parasites. You can dream up new
versions of the future, or meld past and present; you can
envision impossible technology. Science fiction is built to
include moral ambiguity, or the real reason such a flawed
and biased system continues to exist. Everybody on Earth
is probably mostly good, except that they have to do
dubious things to survive (our hero has a history as a car
thief). Everybody on Elysium is probably also mostly
good, except that they were born into privilege and have
never questioned their right to a comfortable life — a
concept that Blomkamp never touches. That would require
a subtle hand, which he doesn’t have: From the angelic
voices on the soundtrack to the cramped action sequences,
everything is built to bludgeon.
Blomkamp’s heaviest tool is the mad-dog agent Kruger
(Sharlto Copley, from District 9), a psychopath kept on a
leash by Elysium’s defense secretary, Delacourt (Jodie
Foster). Kruger exists only to kill people, and to prove that
conniving Delacourt is super, super evil. Why? Because
she believes in keeping the privileged comfortable. Her
character oversimplifies everything Elysium thinks it’s
saying about inequality.
But Elysium oversimplifies a lot of things. Blomkamp
is quite good at displaying his vision of the future; his
dusty, crumbling Los Angeles has a believable Mad Max
vibe, and he never gets hung up on technobabble even
while outfitting his hero, Max (Matt Damon), with an
improbable exoskeleton. Like George Lucas, though,
Blomkamp is very good at setting up a visually fascinating
world and then failing to make narrative sense of it. The
world-building is skin deep, the characters flimsy, the
resolution half-baked and the gender politics unsurprisingly
tired (the two named female characters are motivated by
children). Elysium is gritty and occasionally tense, but the
things that make it different than any other whiz-bang
action film are just set dressing and a pretense toward
deeper meaning. Is it a good-looking science fiction movie
that’s not based on an overused, corporate-owned concept?
Yes, and there should be more of those. But Blomkamp’s
vision simply lacks vision. ■
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