Out-of-this-world!

Director Neil Blomkamp’s much-awaited follow-up to District-9 delivers all of the thought provoking satire it should, but loses its way when the action starts.

When Blomkamp burst onto the scene with District-9 the satirical sci-fi apartheid parable, he found himself with an unexpected hit. Attempting to recreate that magic, he has given us Elysium a film set a century from now in Los Angeles, which is a super-slum and its inhabitants toil away to provide the necessary resources for an artificial world called Elysium which houses the upper-class and elite.

Jodie Foster is Delacourt, the head of Homeland security charged with keeping illegal immigrants out of Elysium, whilst Matt Damon is Max, a man who works in a factory that makes weapons for Elysium. Max is involved in an accident involving radiation and is given five days to live, his only hope is the advanced medical technology the rich have available to them in Elysium.

Naturally, as a former car-thief, he resorts to violent crime in order to find a way into Elysium, getting his body melded with a metal exoskeleton like a poor man’s wolverine, which makes him an unwitting super-powered freedom fighter who finds himself embroiled in the centre of a corrupt plot for Delacourt to take power. This is the crux of the story as Blomkamp himself puts it ‘it is about the third world trying to get into the first’.
 
Sadly, the shrewdness of its satire is lost almost as soon as the explosions start. The status quo of an upper class living in a world free from poverty would have been fascinating to explore and see more of, however, very quickly the film descends into a bloody face-off between Damon’s character and Sharlto Copley’s dastardly Kruger, which could have been born from any action film, and certainly not one as smart as Elysium.

Aside from this, the film is actually terrific. Its hand-held shaky camera style isn’t off-putting and actually adds to the gritty dirty world that the underclass find themselves in. In fact the visuals in general are startlingly good as Blomkamps use of special effects and slow-motion are truly something to behold, particularly when one of the police drones gets blown up by a grenade.
 
Damon is emphatically reliable as Max, although his character does come across as a little simplistic in a film that is attempting to be anything but, unfortunately he falls victim to the rather reductive action sequences he’s at the centre of. That sadly overshadows the emotional effects the storyline is having on him. Foster, Copley and apocalypse queen Alice Braga are also solid.

All-in-all Elysium is a solid more conventional film than District-9. Although not perfect it certainly does go some way to establishing Blomkamp as a master of sci-fi satire, even if this one is dressed up as an action blockbuster.

* Showing in Showing in Cineco, Saar, Seef I