In the year 2154, Earth has become
polluted and overpopulated causing the richest inhabitants to vacate to a space
station that orbits the planet called Elysium.
Up on the celestial utopia there is no crime as well as no illness as
medic stations diagnose and cure all afflictions and diseases, which has left
the poor and the destitute of Earth to try and launch (mostly) suicide missions
in order to try and access the medical facilities.
The plot of the film follows Max (Matt
Damon), a factory worker living in 22nd century Los Angeles who has
dreamed of living on Elysium ever since he lived in an orphanage as a
child. As long as his own dreams, he
also made a childhood promise to his friend Frey (Alice Braga) that he would take
her there too. At the factory one day,
Max suffers an accident that has near fatal consequences, which forces him to
rekindle his previous life of crime in order to get up to the space station and
get cured. There is plenty more going on
but as with any sci-fi, there are plot-spoilers aplenty to navigate. The only other thing worth mentioning is that
the defense secretary of Elysium is the Machiavellian Delacourt (Jodie Foster),
who values the protection of the utopia over all else…
One of the pleasures of watching modern
sci-fi is enjoying the technological/architectural/societal predictions that
good filmmakers employ. After cutting
his teeth on the superb District
9 (An extraterrestrial sci-fi set in essentially modern-day South Africa),
Blomkamp has decided to head further into the future and explore the fate of
America. The set design of the two
worlds (L.A. and Elysium) are both brilliant and unsettling as L.A has become
almost entirely Hispanic and now resembles the slums of South America, where
the space station looks more like a suburbia populated with thunderbirds-style
buildings, palm trees and impeccable lawns.
Earth now mainly speaks English with a Spanish accent, whereby Elysium
speaks English with either a French or German accent. This speaks volumes about where in the world
currently have associations with richness and poverty… The major theme of the film seems to be a direct response to the Occupy movement and the 99% motif.
The film is also littered with
militaristic language familiar to anyone who has watched the news in the
post-Iraq world. The robots that protect
Elysium are called Homeland Security; the defence secretary demands a No-Fly
Zone over L.A.; Max is accused of stealing Big Data; and there are hints of a
coup in the name of ‘Liberty’. This
gives the narrative an unsettling prescience with current global geopolitics
concerning Edward Snowden & Julian Assange, the Syrian crisis and America’s
obsession with border controls.
My only problem with the film (as with a
lot of modern ‘action’ films) is the over reliance on threatened sexual
violence towards women followed by prolonged fight scenes. Too many films use the threat of violence
towards women as the genesis of the protagonist’s motives for despising his
enemy, which allows the audience to enjoy the needlessly long revenge
scenes. Sci-fi should be narratives
about big ideas, which shouldn’t always include a Matrix-influenced hugely
choreographed fight scene – not at the length that exists in Elysium anyway… or
maybe that’s just me
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