DAMMIT, PLANET
When Earth is ruined, the rich and powerful simply float off in a space station
Elysium ★★★
WRITER-DIRECTOR Neill Blomkamp achieved great success with District 9 in 2009. It was made in South Africa, starred Sharlto Copley (pictured below) and picked up four Oscar nominations. It won none, but the film’s success propelled its writer and star into the big leagues.
Now the team is back with yet another sci-fi thriller, this time bigger and more ambitious. The title is ironic, as “Elysium” means “a place or state of perfect happiness” — but the film is really about the breakdown of civilisation on Earth.
It’s overcrowded, consumed by hordes of desperate people, who fight for food and a safe place to live.
Civil society has vanished and the world is ruled by two greedy, violent gangs. There’s an android police force, basically a spin-off of Robocop , and there is a gang of brutal, human mercenaries, who kill at will and want only money.
The rich and powerful no longer live on Earth. They live in total safety and absolute luxury on a space station that floats in Earth’s orbit, called Elysium.
The space station is run by two ruthless people. There’s Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster) as the Secretary of Defence. She is a steely woman, always dressed in pale, cold colours, as arrogant as she is powerful.
The second is billionaire CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner), who produces the robocops and their weapons, which are used to control the rebellious masses living on Earth.
Those two characters go to great lengths to ensure that the safety and wealth of the people of Elysium is maintained.
Interestingly, Elysium does not look like a futuristic sci-fi setting. The space station is filled with expensive homes and gardens, the kind we see in glossy home-and-décor magazines, a stark contrast to the teeming, violent Earth.
The hero, if you want to call him that, is Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), who has been forced to work in one of the factories that produce the police robots. In the process, he meets a woman he met years ago. She is Frey (Alice Braga), who now works as a nurse in the rundown County Hospital, where her daughter, Matilda, is dying of leukaemia.
Max tries to help Frey, but he is transformed into a part-man and part-machine.
As so often happens in the movies, the villain is so much more interesting and complex. The stand-out performance is that of Copley who plays Kruger, a brutal, greedy villain.
Throughout, Copley maintains a strong South African accent and even drops in a few Afrikaans words.
The production itself is impeccable. The locations are superbly used and the de- saturated colours of the chaos on Earth and the blue-and-silver beauty of Elysium make for interesting viewing, but somehow it just does not click into high gear because there are too many storylines.
There’s a lot of great stagecraft, good acting and interesting ideas but they never really connect to each other.