Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Quick Impressions:
“Tempt not a desperate man.”
I’ve read Romeo and Juliet far more times than I’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s version, but for some reason, during most of Elysium’s big action scenes set on Earth, I kept hearing Leonardo DiCaprio’s voice screaming out desperately, “Tempt not a desperate man!”
That’s the moral of Elysium—well, one of the morals. The whole thing feels like a cross between a parable and a video game, a visually sleek, briskly paced sci-fi adventure that dishes out both pointed morals and graphic explosions with a generous—and remarkably heavy—hand.
To be honest, I didn’t love District 9 (though I’ll acknowledge its many merits as a film). From the start, Elysium appealed to me more. It’s more conventionally told, and it also seems warmer. Perhaps the star power of Matt Damon helps. I found it easy to care about him, and I also was quite drawn to Diego Luna and Wagner Moura who plays Spider.
Elysium is not a great film, but great films can sometimes be so ponderous to rewatch that I rarely revisit them. This movie lends itself to repeated family viewing (as long as the family members are of a certain age. It’s a relatively mild R except for a few gratuitously visceral (though blessedly brief) shots of surgical procedures and grisly deaths).
Though he looks at times like he’s dressed up as Doc Ock for Halloween, Matt Damon makes a compelling leading man, crazy Sharlto Copley (Wikus from District 9 ) plays a delightfully unhinged villain, and Jodie Foster’s accent is more mysterious than her enigmatic speech at last year’s Golden Globes. I just wish we got to spend more time on Elysium.
The Good:
The movie looks great. The cinematography is top notch. The effects never look out of place or distracting. To be honest, most of the film looks like a beautifully rendered video game. As I watched, I thought, Didn’t Neill Blomkamp start out making video games? Not exactly. As it turns out, he got famous for making some shorts set within the world of the game Halo. Still, I knew he’d had something to do with video games. This movie really, really reminds me of a video game. First we learn the hero’s backstory. Then we learn his mission. Then he gets to pick up some cool gear (kind of like his main weapon). It really looks almost exactly like so many of the PS3 games I’ve watched my stepson playing. (They’re all very cinematic these days.) Watching, you can even tell where the save points would be.
The whole set up of the world—what happens on Earth, how Elysium operates—didn’t really make sense to me. (I don’t mean that I didn’t understand what we were told, just that the premise seemed inadequate in all sorts of ways if you ask any questions at all.) But basically the Earth looks like a big Mad Max movie now, and while it’s probably better not to think too much about how the society got the way it is, we can still appreciate the visual distinction between Earth and Elysium. They look so different. We can tell them apart immediately. (And too bad we didn’t get to see Elysium more. It’s so beautiful there.)
The movie also has a more captivating story than I’d expected. I actually enjoyed watching all the different threads come together. (In the end, sadly, Elysium drops the ball and doesn’t give us the payoff that we’ve been waiting for, but at least it’s not an incoherent mess.)
We spend most of our time on Earth, so it’s fortunate that’s where all the most interesting characters live. Matt Damon plays Max, an immediately likable protagonist who is punished for being human and having a sense of humor (and also for larceny which his charm quickly makes us forget). Damon makes the beginning of the movie extremely compelling. I personally noticed that the more out-of-it he got, the less I engaged with the story. But at the beginning before the action has really picked up, it’s Damon’s charming portrayal of Max that gets our attention.
Perfectly cast as the nefarious, heartless Capitalist factory owner, William Fitchner is brilliant as Max’s boss John Carlisle. Early on, Fitchner’s scenes were some of my favorites. He’s absolutely the right guy from the part. Even his austere cheekbones seem to fit the character.
Diego Luna emits amazing vulnerability. I loved him as Julio. Warming up to Wagner Moura took me longer, but over time, Spider became one of my favorite characters (thanks largely to Moura’s performance because I honestly think the character is inconsistently written).
Alice Braga and Emma Tremblay (playing Max’s beloved childhood friend and her daughter) need more to work with, I think. They’re lovely and Braga has some fine moments (the more intense the situation, the better she is), but I’m wondering if Blomkamp directs men better than women. These characters are central to the story, but something always seems just kind of vague about them. I don’t think it’s their fault.
Finest of the Earth bunch is probably Sharlto Copley who gets the fun job of playing the psychopath. He does it with great panache and feels extremely authentic. He’s playing someone insane and larger than life, yet his performance is one of the most natural in the entire movie.
Meanwhile, up on Elysium, everybody is a whole lot weirder, especially poor Jodie Foster who is always seen wearing a pants suit and standing up near a railing. Apparently that’s what she does all day—strategically stand parallel to railings so we can see that she doesn’t sit down on the job. She means business. Foster seems a bit out of sync with the rest of the film, but she is a very good actress, and it’s nice to see her. She doesn’t seem particularly suited to the role, but she definitely makes the most of it. Faran Tahir makes the most of his limited screentime, too.
Funniest Scene:
It’s pretty hard not to laugh when Max receives his pills and the instructions that go with them.
Best Action Sequence:
To me the clear standout in the movie is the moment when Max and his crew attack their mark. That’s a wonderful scene. It’s genuinely exciting because all the separate threads we’ve seen so far are finally beginning to come together. The action is constant and reasonably unpredictable. Plus it actually means something. It’s exciting. Watching, I realized suddenly that I was quite eager to watch more.
The last action sequence, on the other hand, did not hold my interest. By then, it was already clear what would happen. Unusually (for me) I did not zone out. I watched everything as it happened, but I didn’t care very much about the outcome anymore (never a good sign).
Best Scene:
By far my favorite scene is the one I just mentioned where Max and his crew attempt to complete their mission while under attack. But I also like the intensity of the unpleasant scene when Kruger interrogates Matilda.
Best Scene Visually:
The crash (the one that comes late in the movie) is pretty exciting, though I must admit that probably my favorite visual early on was William Fitchner’s face. It’s so gaunt. I remember him at one moment in profile, surrounded by a white room. That was just a very striking image.
The entirety of Elysium looks magnificent. The wait to get there began to feel interminable to me as the movie dragged on. After a tantalizing early peek, I had so hoped that the film would soon take us to that beautiful world beyond.
The Negatives:
I like Jodie Foster. I’ve always liked Jodie Foster. When I was in junior high, I’d entertain (i.e. freak out) my little sister by having long conversations with myself as both Hannibal Lecter and Clarice, and we watched Freaky Friday so often that to this day, we still giggle at the mention of “Catty Kibble” or “that rat-fink Mary Kay.” Jodie Foster is (and always has been) a talented actress with enough charisma to carry a movie. But what is up with that accent?
I tried to give it a chance, but I found her accent pretty off-putting. At first, it was just distracting. The thing is, I’m sure she’s done an accent before. She’s had such a long career. But I don’t remember ever hearing her do an accent before (unless you count Nell). Usually, Jodie Foster talks just like Jodie Foster whether she’s in the FBI, the old West, a panic room, her mother’s body, etc. I guess she has often done a Southern accent, but that just sounds like Jodie Foster leaning a little further in to her natural voice.
In Elysium, she seems to be going for South African and not quite getting there. (I won’t claim to be a dialect expert, but based on what’s coming out of her mouth, and the director’s South African origins, that’s just what I’m guessing. It’s possible she’s supposed to be from some other country in the Africa of the future, or maybe that she’s just a really lonely sociopath who’s obsessed with the movie Blood Diamond and is channeling her inner Rhodesian Leonardo DiCaprio. After all, I kept thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio during this movie, so why shouldn’t she?)
Anyway, the first problem with her accent is that it’s not really working. She leans into it heavily at the beginnings of words, phrases, sentences, but by the end of what she’s saying, too often, the accent at least partially disappears. So she doesn’t sound South African. She just sounds weird. I guess you could argue that a crisp, pretentious, affected accent fits the character, but the mere fact that enjoying the performance involves coming up with arguments in defense of it is not a terribly good sign.
The second (and by far the greater) problem with the accent is that it’s so distracting that Jodie Foster disappears into it. It even seems to be distracting her. She seems to be more concerned about talking in that weird way than about anything else. So why not just hire a South African actress or let Jodie Foster talk in a more natural voice? Why waste Jodie Foster? She’s a brilliant and high powered actress, but we’re losing a lot of her performance here because of her distracting accent. I think she should have dropped the accent. Maybe it should have worked on paper, but clearly in the movie it doesn’t work, and when the director saw that happening, he should have told her to drop the accent. So I’m blaming Neill Blomkamp for this one.
This brings up another point. Except for the delightfully unhinged Kruger (played with panache by the actually South African Sharlto Copley) and his tiny band of off-kilter sociopaths, Matt Damon seems to be like basically the only white guy living on Earth. (Remember, William Fitchner just commutes.) Most people around Damon appear to be Hispanic or Latino (I’m using both terms because the population is very vague). Almost everyone runs around speaking Spanish. Meanwhile, Elysium appears to be under the thumb of evil white faux South Africans and for some reason, a puzzlingly well-meaning perhaps Indian or Pakistani president played by Faran Tahir.
Here’s why that bugged me. Well, for one thing, it’s just too pointed, too heavy handed. After seeing this movie and District 9, it seems impossible not to conclude that South African writer/director Neill Blomkamp has a lot to say about discrimination, segregation, class privilege, and other exciting inequalities. Blomkamp was born in 1979 (like me), but he grew up under Apartheid in South Africa (not like me) and as he reached puberty, he got to see it end (or at least begin to end) before his eyes. So of course, he’s got a lot to say about discrimination. And he’s making a Hollywood blockbuster, so to make his own interests relevant to an American audience, of course he’s going to try to relate to us by stressing hot-button issues like border control and universal health care. But come on. Surely the people on Elysium have a better life for all kinds of reasons, but all the movie shows us is hordes of sickly, ethnically vague, Spanish speaking people trying to sneak into Elysium (with the help of illegal “guides” one of whom is named Spider) in order to get free health care. I’ve seen political campaign ads that are more subtle.
And here’s the other thing (really an aspect of the first thing). When you make a movie so transparent, then you sacrifice the level of complexity necessary to make the world of the story seem realistic. The whole point of a well told fable is that it teaches us a lesson. There’s nothing in the story that isn’t necessary for getting the moral across. But real life is much messier, more chaotic, just flat out bigger than that. The story of Elysium is so pared down (so that we can’t miss the point) that it’s impossible to suspend disbelief and get lost in the world of the movie. You just never forget that you’re being told a contrived little story with a handy lesson at the end. Basically, Elysium is too simple to be satisfying.
If you examine the premise with any level of scrutiny at all, the whole thing just falls apart. The set up doesn’t make sense. The world as it allegedly works is not sustainable, and I find it hard to believe that things would actually be operating this way. Okay, so Earth has fewer resources, but it seems like they’ve got plenty of room (lots of wide sandy expanses from where I was sitting) and lots of manpower. Maybe they don’t have the cure for every ailment, but what’s to stop them from getting a few decent civil engineers? Elysium doesn’t seem to be a separate place. The people who govern Elysium seem to govern Earth, too, so why hasn’t humankind made a push to create a society where future generations can flourish? I appreciate that the elite are a bunch of entitled jerks, but the way they’re living now is not sustainable. They’re on a relatively tiny satellite, yet they have the technology to cure every single ailment. Since they’re all so concerned about their families, they ought to realize that if they continue to reproduce, they will at the very least have to build a bigger satellite.
I guess I just don’t buy the movie’s set up. How did things get this way? My husband pointed out that on Earth, there’s a huge divide between the ninety-nine percent and the one-percent. He pointed out that the less well off don’t cause as much trouble because we’re given a pleasant life to pre-occupy us. And yes, the concept of bread and circuses for the masses is not new, but the fact remains that right now while there are people who don’t care about others and want only to suppress anyone who might take their wealth, there are also humanitarians, scholars, philanthropists, diplomats, activists who have very different goals. Where are all of those people? Did the robots kill them or something? I mean, I realize that the movie is giving us a visually dramatic metaphor, an example of a disturbing trend. But it doesn’t feel real. The whole set up feels like a big, symbolic cautionary tale or a high budget slippery slope.
Most disappointing to me was the movie’s ending. Early on, I was surprised (and really pleased) to discover that Elysium was setting up a plot much more intricate and complicated than the previews had led me to believe. For a while there, every new scene brought a fresh complication, motivation, double-cross, unexpected ripple. The movie takes its time and so painstakingly sets up all its wicked plans and double-crosses so very, very carefully. And then at the end, they all have a fight with big, explodey guns and everything blows up. What a huge let down! Why take the time to create such a provocative situation only to end it all slapdashly in a relatively generic bloodbath? My husband suggested that perhaps Blomkamp was going for some kind of “best laid plans of mice and men” effect, and I’ll grant that it’s likely that he wanted to cram yet another lesson in there. But the second half definitely did not deliver on the first half’s promise.
And why did we need the scene with the bone saw? Was the film in danger of getting a PG-13 instead of an R? (I can believe it. Except for the sporadic bits of graphic violence, the movie is very mild.) I really am not a fan of gore for gore’s sake.
Overall:
Without a doubt, District 9 is the superior film, but I honestly think Elysium may be a more enjoyable movie. I found many of the early scenes spell binding and intense, but the ending truly disappointed me. It just isn’t as good an ending as the first half deserves. Still Matt Damon is likable, the visuals are superb, the supporting cast is great, and Jodie Foster will definitely get your attention. Elysium is one of the stronger science fiction films of the summer (which isn’t saying much, but might be saying just enough to get you to buy a ticket if you have nothing better to do).