With his previous hit District 9 and now Elysium, South African director Neill Blomkamp has cornered a specific sub-genre: the sci-fi socialist action flick. In the Jo'berg-set debut from 2009, the crustacean-like aliens scavenge garbage piles and live in a filthy shantytown, segregated from the human population. District 9 is an alien film, with spaceships and laser guns, but it's actually a clever allegory about class and institutional discrimination.
Now in his new film set in 2154, Earth has become overcrowded and over-polluted. The wealthiest class has fled to live in the orbiting utopia called Elysium, where every house has a manicured lawn and all diseases can be cured, while the poor are left stranded on this slum-like planet, persecuted by fascist droids and money-mad corporate types. Inequality is so glaring that unsurprisingly, a revolution, or at least a few space shuttles full of desperadoes, is inevitable.
Matt Damon plays Max, an orphaned boy and legendary ex-carjacker who now earns his living working in a factory. But as is always the case everywhere in the world, workers are disposable. When Max is exposed to radioactivity and ditched by his cold-blooded capitalist employers, he teams up with underground data bandits and human smugglers (the term has a positive vibe here) to rocket himself off from Earth and breach into Elysium, where he can be healed. Obstructing his path are the brutal paramilitary soldier Kruger (Sharlto Copley, in thick South African accent) and Minister Delacourt (Jodie Foster), Elysium's Homeland Security strongwoman who's always eager to zap illegal immigrants into galactic dust.
Elysium, again, is an allegory, though a much less subtle one than District 9. Max and all those sick people who desperately fly off from Earth-ghettos to try to reach the paradise of Elysium stand in for anything from boat people adrift off Australian shores to the Rohingyas in the Andaman and to those folks who fight for the elusive visa to enter the European nations. They're ready to die along the way than to perish in their current hopelessness. In Max's case, it helps a great deal that he has access to a lot of guns, hand grenades and neurologically inserted biotech thingamabobs that enhance his performance as an action hero.
For a film about rich-v-poor disparity _ and apparently we know which camp the film sides with _ Elysium does have a lot of money to burn. I don't mean to carp about its ideology, for that would be unfair to this largely entertaining film with an honest social message. It's just that Blomkamp, now working with A-list stars and with a global audience in mind, cannot play it fast and loose as he did in District 9, whose slight unruliness and pungent bites make it a more original and more accomplished film.
Elysium feels smoother but less edgy; it's more of an action thriller than a satire, and while the film's brand of left-wing push has an air of immediacy, it's also somewhat naive. Universal healthcare to help the poor is noble and a must, but we all know that it would take much more than the miraculous "Med Bed" shown in the film, which can cure even terminal leukaemia in two seconds.
What Blomkamp does best is his rendition of the futuristic Earth that looks like a shabby Third-World neighbourhood, or at least a Los Angeles suburb populated by people who speak Spanish. The high technology in the film _ space shuttles, cyber-cerebral connectivity, super-guns, etc _ has the appearance of low-tech vintage gadgets; the source code in the supposedly sophisticated computer is run on something like DOS from the 90s, without any sleek polish of Steve Jobs's genius. Without even a mouse. Elysium, like District 9, views technology as a necessary tool in social revolution as well as complicit in budding anarchy and dictatorial control.
But of course you can ignore all of this. You can glide over the Metropolis-like parable and head right into the Mad Max mode. Damon as Max propels the film with muscles and intensity _ that first and the social commentary later is maybe a fair enough deal for our multiplex experience.
