By Brent Hannon
Director Neil Blomkamp is at it again, this time with the film Elysium. Set in the year 2154, the Earth is in shambles. The opening cinematics shown are of a city comprised of improvised shacks built on endless acres of dry cracked dirt. Sky scrapers are now nothing more than their framework with more shacks built within them (I think I would opt to live in a shack firmly planted on the ground). The people that are left on the planet make due with what they have, which isn’t much. Pretty much the entire planet is now a third world country. Above the Earth is Elysium, a gigantic space station complete with lush vegetation, futuristic buildings, and pristine houses (think little mansions). They also possess advanced medical technology; a glass domed medical bed, that can heal, cure, and reconstruct anything on a living human (dead is still dead it seems). All told, this story boils down to class warfare taken to an extraterrestrial level.
At the beginning of the movie there is a flashback of Max (Matt Damon) as a child. A nun tells him to hurry up and come inside. Once inside he meets a girl by the name of Frey. They become best of friends and she even teaches him how to read. I’m assuming that, in this version of Earth, not everyone learns to read and write. The next scene is of Max as an adult; we soon learn that he has lead a rough life including a handful of felonies. He even has a lot of tattoos that he picked up while in prison. He works on an assembly line building robots for the Armadyne Corporation. The robots are used as police on Earth as well as body guards to the officials of Elysium. Max has a run in with these robot police while waiting in line to see if there is work at the factory for him. During this encounter he smarts off to them, which is a big mistake. They react with extreme aggression once they see that he is a felon, and Max ends up with an injury bad enough to send him to the hospital. At the hospital his nurse turns out to be Frey (Alice Braga). It would seem that their paths parted when he started getting into trouble, so they have not seen each other in some time. Frey ends up agreeing to get coffee with him later. Returning to work, Max has to convince the foreman that he can work with a cast on and is docked half a days pay for the time he missed.
It is from this point that the plot begins to take shape. The officials of Elysium are willing to go to extreme lengths to maintain their segregation and it is shown when those still living on Earth attempt to better themselves by any means necessary. The chief opponent of the rebels from Earth is Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster), a woman who is not afraid to get her hands dirty to protect a society that she loves. A series of events occur that lead to Max being fitted with the exoskeleton that is shown in the trailers as well as on the case of the DVD/Blueray. This gives him the same strength as the robots he will have to engage while on his journey.
There is a lot of negative press about this movie and I can understand where some of it is coming from. If you have seen District 9, this has a similar story to that one. I think that Blomkamp has a deep passion for stories about the less fortunate and oppressed overcoming their oppressors. What he is very good at is making his worlds believable. There is a true feel of grit, poverty, and hardship on that futuristic desolate Earth. What has fallen apart, sky scrapers for example, is re-purposed to suit current needs. I did enjoy this movie more than I thought I would. It’s easy to be apprehensive when the majority of the previews and reviews for a movie bash it for one reason or another. I have seen most of the titles of the bad reviews and whatever text the links show on their preview, but fortunately I did not read any of them before hand. A few of those reviews say Blomkamp spent too much time pushing his political views via this film. So what, he wrote and directed this movie; he is allowed to express his opinion. I didn’t get a sense that he slacked off on any other aspect of his movie because he was so preoccupied with his political views. What I’m getting at is that this is a good scifi movie that is definitely worth checking out.
Rating: 7/10