Posted By Michelle Ealey on August 13, 2013

In Greek mythology, Elysium is where the blessed go to live after death. In a sense, the Earth in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium is dead, prompting the wealthiest of the wealthy to retreat to a paradise in space. Blomkamp, who wrote and directed the film, aimed for the stars, but he missed. Delivering instead a mediocre action flick that ignores character development, the urge to create a nuanced story, and logic.

Elysium starts as many post-apocalyptic stories do: overpopulation, disease, and other calamities have made Earth almost uninhabitable. In order to protect their culture, the wealthy community, a group that is predominantly white, moved to a space station that can be seen during the day by the people of Los Angeles, CA. While the entire Earth is suffering, the story takes place in Los Angeles, in the year 2154, and Elysium. LA is filthy, with trash everywhere, buildings are packed tight with people and rundown, and the air is dusty. A predominately Hispanic population lives in this desolate squalor and people struggle every day to find work, food, medical care, and hope.

The film begins with Max as a child growing up in an orphanage. Max longs for a better life, gazing at Elysium spinning in the sky. Grown-up Max DeCosta (Matt Damon) hasn’t achieved his dream yet. After serving time for grand theft auto, assault, and resisting arrest, all Max wants to do is keep his job and not violate his parole. In this future, robots are a part of life. They are the police, bodyguards, parole officers, and other authority figures. Max can’t reason with them when a couple of robotic police officers stop and search his backpack and with the automaton parole officer who repeatedly tells him to stop talking as Max’s parole is extended. Robots hold many positions of authority on Earth, but there are not enough of them yet to render a human workforce obsolete. Max’s job is building robots for the company owned by John Carlyle (William Fichtner), a man obsessed with the bottom line and who orders his workers not to breathe on him.

Matt Damon as Max DeCosta

The first part of the film cuts from Max’s childhood, to Max’s daily life, and to life on Elysium. Elysium glitters as it is a glorious feat of engineering and the station reminds me of the Citadel from the Mass Effect franchise. Big homes, green lawns, pools, lakes—everything the wealthy had on Earth is recreated in space. Robots are guards and servants in Elysium, and other technological marvels are there for the elite to use at any time, including medical pods that magically cure all ails from burns to cancer. The people living on Earth know what wonders are in Elysium. A few entrepreneurs have learned how to forge DNA IDs and smuggle a lucky few to the space station. Protecting Elysium is Secretary of Defense Delacourt (Jodie Foster). Delacourt uses strict measures to protect the space station. When three unauthorized shuttles approach the station, she has Agent Kruger (Sharlto Copley) shoot them down with missiles. Employing extreme measures gets her into trouble with the president who tells her not to use Kruger, a man who has killed, raped, and engaged in other horrible acts, again.

Although all is good in paradise, sometimes the greedy get greedier. Delacourt conspires with Carlyle to overthrow the president and put herself in charge. Delacourt wants Carlyle to write a program that can reboot Elysium and somehow recognize her as the only one in charge. Elysium is a complex piece of technology and the population knows who is in charge, so how is a bit of code supposed to override all security measures and convince the people who spent a lot of money to live there that a change in the power structure happened overnight? Yes, a mistake in math can send a satellite in the wrong direction, but this concerns a structure more complicated than the International Space Station currently orbiting Earth. Delacourt has no known supporters. She isn’t in charge of a group organizing a coup, so she really doesn’t pose a threat to anyone.

Jodie Foster as Delacourt

Back on Earth, Max is ordered to do whatever it takes to get a door unjammed. To do so, he enters the room, but he gets trapped. The room fills with radiation. On Elysium he could be cured, but on Earth, he is given pills and told he has five days to live. Max doesn’t want to die, so he goes to Spider (Wagner Moura) to do one last job for him to earn passage to Elysium. Spider’s plan is to put a third-generation exoskeleton on Max and to have Max steal information from an Elysium citizen’s head. Max targets Carlyle. The information from Carlyle’s head is downloaded into Max, but the rest of the job goes wrong and Max has to flee. Delacourt sends Kruger after Max because the information is the code Delacourt wants to use to take over Elysium.

Here’s the thing about the exoskeleton: it is drilled into the bone over Max’s clothes. Once the exoskeleton is attached, it is almost impossible to remove, so he can’t change his clothes. Max’s clothes were dirty when the exoskeleton went on and he wears the same clothes for days, but no one comments on how much Max would stink at this point. Also, the exoskeleton makes one stronger. It doesn’t teach the wearer how to fight or shoot guns. There is nothing to suggest Max is capable to take on a trained killer like Kruger, but somehow he can.

Sharlto Copley as Kruger

Kruger is the devil Delacourt needs. How they know each other isn’t made clear, but somehow he is her agent, and it seems he is also the defense system of Elysium. Why he had to shoot down the shuttles trying to illegally enter Elysium isn’t clear. One would think Elysium would have a defense grid. The station would need protection from illegal shuttles and space objects like meteors and asteroids.

The action stems from Kruger’s pursuit of Max for what is in Max’s head. Their fight scenes are intense and brutal. Kruger enjoys blowing people up, but the gag of seeing people’s meaty bits flying everywhere got old quick. After the third time, it felt like Blomkamp was sitting in the director’s chair laughing like a giddy 12-year-old playing with explosives and experimenting with them to see how they work. During a fight, a grenade goes off in the shuttle, blowing about 90% of Kruger’s face off (shown in slow motion), but he lives. His crew takes him to a medical pod. The pod can heal him because his brain isn’t damaged. This is another time when I rolled my eyes. Explosives don’t work that way. Grenades cause damage by rapidly expanding the air outward. Kruger’s head is slammed against the shuttle, so some brain damaged is expected. Not only should Kruger have brain damage, but there should be more damage to the shuttle and the people inside than depicted in the film.

Max fights one of Kruger’s men

Elysium is not understated. Its message is very clear: rich people suck and poor people have rights. The characters don’t grow over the course of this very simple story, which is set in a future where only men can do big action stuff (the film fails the Bechdel test). Max does the Heroic Thing at the end and change is thrust on others, but we don’t see the outcome of such a huge act. District 9 (2009) was also a message film, but what made that film so compelling was watching, in horror, as Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) transformed. Elysium wants to be smart sci-fi, but looking under the gleaming surface exposes the lapses in logic and lazy storytelling. The fight between Max and Kruger is what drives the story, not an exploration of immigration, economics, or basic human rights. Big Bad Guy pursues Good Guy—that’s the plot of the film. There is no murky middle ground. Subtle shades of grey would have elevated Elysium from what it is—a basic action film.

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Categories: Movies, Reviews
Tags: Agent Kruger, Elysium, Jodie Foster, Matt Damon, Max DeCosta, Movie Review, Neill Blomkamp, sci-fi action movie, Secretary of Defense Delacourt, Sharlto Copley