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| This guy gives the most memorable performance in Elysium. |
««1/2 Elysium. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. At neighborhood theaters.
"Do you think I like breathing this air?"
asks the priggish CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner) in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium. He objects to the very air on planet
Earth because, by the late 21st century, the entire planet has become
a shantytown, a prison/toilet for the teeming billions who represent the vast
majority of human beings. One percenters like Carlyle have meanwhile decamped
for Elysium, an orbiting gated community where the air is fresh, there is no
disease, and the people are diverted by an endless series of cocktail parties.
The
South African director's last film, District
9, was a breath of fresh air when it arrived in 2009. The story of a very different
sort of alien invasion, it was witty and topical and perhaps the most effective
piece of sci-fi-themed political satire since the original Robocop a generation earlier. Expectations for this follow-up were
therefore pretty high. Unfortunately, there turns out to be nothing
particularly original about Elysium.
Instead of a breath of fresh air, we get something like the air on a
jetliner—breathable, but stale.
The
hero is Max (Matt Damon), a small-time criminal lately down by law. He's just
trying to go straight, but that's a tall order when he's being profiled by the
police, and the police are all robots. The best scenes in Elysium show Damon's dealings with robo-cops and silicon parole
officers, struggling to cope with their machine literalness yet keep his cool
("Are you being hostile or abusive? Would you like some drugs?").
Unfortunately, all these scenes were given away in the coming attractions.
What's
left is little more than the usual summer action-salad. Max is irradiated on
the job, so he makes a deal with some gangsters to get himself smuggled to
Elysium and its miraculous (and apparently cost-free) medical care. Standing in
his way is Kruger, a borderline psychotic mercenary (Sharlto Copley) in the
employ of Elysium's defense minister (Jodie Foster). Much of the film comes off
as a set-up for the inevitable mano y
mano clash between Max and Kruger, which is perhaps the least interesting direction Blomkamp
could have taken his premise.
To be
sure, the film features some terrific production design. We can only admire the
dedication that moved Blomkamp and his crew to breathe human fecal dust for two
weeks as they shot in the world's largest landfill, outside Mexico City. Copley—the
lead in District 9, and lately seen
in Europa Report— speaks in an almost
impenetrable Afrikaans accent, coming off as a seriously addled safari guide.
He isn't exactly scary, but he is a unique presence.
Foster,
on the other hand, is completely wasted as every Tea Partier's imaginary
caricature of Nancy Pelosi. Nor the idea of futuristic economic apartheid
exactly original, forming the basis even for young adult epics like The Hunger Games. Blomkamp needed to do
something more with it, but opts instead to condescend to the audience, given
them a ten-buck theme park ride instead of the intelligent satire of District 9.
In the
end, Elysium comes off like an
underwhelming remake of some 70's sci-fi opus we never saw. Like Logan's Run or Rollerball, the original would have been something with way worse
special effects, less action, but a lot more substance.
©
2013 Nicholas Nicastro
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