Blomkamp’s film takes flak from conservative media
NEILL Blomkamp’s new billionrand movie launched into first place for profits and political controversy in the US this weekend.
The South African director, who made his name with the low-budget District 9 in 2009, has now directed Elysium, starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and South African Sharlto Copley.
Industry experts predicted that the movie would beat Disney’s blockbuster Planes to earn more than R300-million this weekend. It is showing at 3 300 cinemas in the US.
Blomkamp’s science-fiction script has triggered a flood of criticism from conservative media, which have called it “blatant socialist propaganda”.
Elysium depicts a world in which inequality and the fears of the wealthy have reached such an extreme that the elite have left the planet — a galactic emigration to the suburbs.
Earth has become a slum and the wealthy live in a giant, luxurious orbiting space station with access to advanced medical care.
Damon’s working-class character is forced to become an illegal immigrant in an attempt to liberate healthcare for the masses below.
The Wall Street Journal has praised the movie as “classy class warfare”, but the film was met with howling protest from Barack Obama’s critics, who feared it might revive the bitter debate of last year’s presidential election over the low taxes and massive corporate rewards that are enjoyed by the country’s top 1%.
Right-wing website Breitbart was so furious with the “socialist sci-fi movie” that it took aim at the director’s origins, branding him “Neill Apartheid”.
Variety magazine described the movie as promoting “[one of the] more openly socialist political agendas of any Hollywood movie in memory, beating the drum loudly not just for universal healthcare, but for open borders, unconditional amnesty and the abolition of class distinctions”.
In an interview with Wired magazine at his home in Vancouver, Blomkamp denied any deliberate political message, but said the movie exaggerated inequalities that already existed. However, the first page of the movie’s website includes an icon for the “Civil Cooperation Bureau” used to control illegal immigrants to the opulence of orbit — an apparently provocative reference to the apartheid-era hit squad.
Describing Los Angeles, the setting for the terrestrial parts of the film, as “diet Joburg”, Blomkamp said that some US cities were starting to see the opening shots of the kind of class warfare he witnessed for years in South African cities.
“In South Africa, they have these really cheesy names for gated communities, so it’s like Eden, the gated community, right? And that was the idea for Elysium. It was a satire of that.”
Blomkamp also revealed that he had considered casting South African rapper Ninja, from the band Die Antwoord, in the role now performed by Damon, although on a lower budget version of the movie.