TAKE TWO REVIEW: 'Elysium' loses punch from never-ending fight scenes
By David Bjorkgren
Managing editor
Life on Elysium is pretty sweet. Sun-bathed gardens and swimming pools lead to palatial mansion homes. Money, influence and technology reign. Everyone looks great, and no wonder. They’re in perfect health, thanks to the crowning achievement of Elysium society—medical bays in every home that can cure anything.
The fact that it’s all on a space station orbiting a less-than desirable planet Earth completes the scene in Director Neilll Blomkamp’s futuristic film “Elysium.” Blomkamp previously brought us “District 9,” a delightful and quirky film about aliens as second class citizens in South Africa. “Elysium” continues this exploration of the downtrodden. Apparently, the wealthy have abandoned the Earth for the space station, and they’ve taken all their toys with them. Elysium society rules the overpopulated, resource-deprived residents of the Earth with the help of a police force of drone robots. People living on Earth are non-citizens, have no rights, are considered expendable and are tolerated merely as laborers.
Any similarity between the film and the widening gap seen today between the rich and the poor is purely intentional. Blomkamp does not hide his political views but puts it all on the screen, even referring to Elysium’s security forces as “homeland security.” The film extrapolates what could happen if the middle class disappears and the wealthy continue to isolate themselves from the rest of us.
Unfortunately,” Elysium “ is also a love fest to cartoonish fight scenes that seriously slow down the pace of the film. Blomkamp loses control of the story for a time, as extended gun fights and hand-to-hand combat muddle the flow of the film (People of Earth may lack everything else, but they seem to have plenty of fire power).
Driving the action in the film is the unquenchable desire of Earth’s people to go to Elysium and get that swell medical care they offer. (Earth’s medicine is still at the primitive 21st Century level, with hospitals and doctors and pills and things.) Occasionally, a crafty group of peasants are able to commandeer a shuttle and fly to the space station.
And so, Elysium has an immigration problem. They don’t want any. Elysium ‘s defense secretary, Delacourt (Jodie Foster) is particularly hell-bent on keeping unwanted folks off her station. Along with a missile defense system, she also has at her disposal sleeper agents on Earth who help put down any insurgents. She’s at odds with Elysium’s president, who doesn’t appreciate her heavy-handed tactics.
Enter Max (Matt Damon). He’s dreamed of going to Elysium since he was a small boy. An ex-convict, Max has tried to fly right, working at a factory that makes those police drone robots. Unfortunately for Max, everything suddenly goes wrong. An industrial accident exposes him to lethal radiation, giving him a five-day death sentence. Suddenly his quest to get to Elysium takes on new urgency.
He’s treated, coincidently, by his boyhood friend Frey (Alice Braga) , now a nurse with a daughter who has leukemia. A trip to Elysium might be good for what ails her, too. Max approaches a criminal acquaintance, Spider ( Wagner Moura), who has wanted to launch an assault on Elysium for some time now. Max agrees to a plot to kidnap an Elysium executive (Max’s boss, actually) in exchange for a ride to the space station. Part of the deal is that he has to download information from the executive’s head into his own head that contains all kinds of passcodes and such that will help them land on the station.
Unknown to them, this executive has conspired with Delacourt to create a reboot code for Elysium’s operating systems so she can input the name of a new president and end the current president’s reign.
Max acquires the information and now has the potential knowledge to rewrite Elysium’s priorities to improve the life of everyone on Earth. He becomes enemy number one as Delacourt’s agent, Kruger (Sharito Copley), is ordered by Delacourt to track him down.
The fates are with Max, who manages to not only finagle a trip to Elysium, but to take his girlfriend and her leukemia-ridden daughter with him.
The action accelerates to the point where I asked myself, “What the hell is going on?” before It screeches to an abrupt halt as Kruger gets into a protracted fight with Max. People get killed, a face explodes and the story eventually winds down to a satisfactory conclusion.
The film boasts some fantastic visuals, particularly during scenes at the space station. Blomkamp makes a valiant effort to explore issues of inequality and brings a gritty sense of reality to the film, but he paints in broad strokes. High concept ideas aren’t adequately explored but get trashed in favor of violence, gun fire and explosions.
Still, there are aspects of the film that evoke the magic Blomkamp brought to “District 9.” While not quite as satisfying, “Elysium” delivers most of what it promises. I give “Elysium” 7.5 luxury space stations out of 10.
By Arthur C. Ryan
NEWS Movie Critic
The concept is simple, it’s the year 2154, and the wealthy live on Elysium, a space station orbiting the Earth. The residents there are mostly white, wealthy and powerful, living a life of luxury void of disease or hunger. On the planet below, poverty, crime and disease dominate all those who live there, including the film’s protagonist, Max, played by Matt Damon.
And for about an hour or so, Elysium, released in movie theaters this past weekend, is engrossing and conjures up memories of 1970s sci-fi action films, Soylent Green and THX-1138, but soon after digresses into standard action film fare, with one too many fight scenes which become flat, predictable and boring.
At the film’s start, we are introduced to Max as a child, living in an orphanage run by nuns, where he dreams of one day living on Elysium with his childhood sweetheart, Frey.
Soon after Damon appears as the grown-up Max, a paroled car thief trying to go straight while working for a Haliburton-like weapons manufacture, where following an accident he must now find a way to Elysium in order to live.
Standing in Max’s way of obtaining health-care only available to those who live on Elysium, is its defense secretary, Mrs. Delacourt, played horribly by Jodie Foster. Foster’s defense secretary is heartless and cares for no one but herself. It’s a broad performance that doesn’t quite jive with the rest of the film’s performances, and I still can’t figure out what Foster was trying to achieve with her odd, “maybe it was French” accent.
Foster’s dirty work on Earth is carried out by a grunt named Kruger, a psycho-pathic secret agent who is charged with preventing Max from leaving Earth. Kruger is played by Sharlto Copley, who starred in District 9 back in 2009, which was also written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Blomkamp, fills his Elysium with similar themes as District 9, many of them inspired by his childhood growing up during Apartheid in South Africa. Elysium is political in nature, immigration, health care, and class warfare are at its core, but unlike District 9, most of it becomes muddled, when Blomkamp switches gears and highlights fight scene after fight scene in place of plotline. I’m sure these violent battles will make the film popular with the video-game crowd, but most sci-fi fans will be disappointed.
By film’s end, the story recovered, but it was too-little too-late, for what started out as a great idea, was squandered by a director who should have trusted his own instincts, rather than simply rely on what is popular.
