Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film, District 9, proved that you don’t need a huge budget to make a sci-fi action movie that audiences will love. All you need is an original voice, a little ingenuity, and a lot of luck. It’s the same formula guys like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg used to make things like Star Wars and Jaws, after all. District 9 brought up an interesting question though. If Blomkamp was able to accomplish as much as he did there on a shoestring budget and with a cast of relative unknowns, what would he be able to do if he got the Hollywood machine and a good deal of money behind him? Unfortunately, Elysium provides us the answer to that question, and the answer is that he would make something that looks great, but that panders to the masses so thoroughly it couldn’t possibly be enjoyed by anyone who approaches movies with an ounce of discerning taste.
The story is one that’s rich with allegory, and one that you’d think the guy who explored political questions surrounding refugees so adeptly via an alien invasion story in District 9 would be able to nail. In the future, class lines are divided even further apart than they are today. The poor are huddled together on Earth, which is overpopulated, crime-ridden, and full of sadness and disease. The rich live on an immaculate space station called Elysium, which is basically the ultimate gated community, and where any disease or injury can instantly be cured with a simple scan from a machine that everyone has in their house. Matt Damon plays a poor schlub who’s trying to leave his life of crime behind, but who gets hit with a lethal dose of radiation at his factory job, winds up with only five days to live, and has to resort to consorting with the most wanted kind of criminals—people smugglers who are constantly trying to get the wounded and sick to Elysium, but who generally get them blown up by Elysium security in the process—in order to get him up to the space station and heal himself.
The problems with the film are that its script is just so impossibly, embarrassingly clunky, a few of its performances are so bad that they make you squirm, and Blomkamp’s directorial touch is so heavy-handed that he resembles an old-timey stage actor trying to project to the back of the room before microphones were invented. The dialogue is so hackneyed and it spells the movie’s themes out with so many thuds that it’s likely to leave bruises on you, so many silly symbols and metaphors (an important necklace, and important tattoo, etc...) get introduced and then flashed back to in pivotal moments that you eventually start to feel the filmmakers’ elbows nudging you in your ribs any time something that’s supposed to be important is happening, and so many flashbacks happen, so often, to so many things, that you begin to feel like Blomkamp thinks that you have the short term memory of a goldfish. The film does have a number of entertaining action scenes, and Sharlto Copley does make for a memorably detestable villain, but the transparently manipulative and condescendingly simple nature of the storytelling just smothers anything that would have earned praise otherwise. And let’s not even get started on whatever Jodie Foster was trying to do with her ridiculous performance. What kind of an accent was that? Those were the best takes she provided?
