Elysium

2154. The wealthy have left a tired Earth to live on Elysium, a satellite land. Max, played by Matt Damon, a former criminal, gets a dangerous radiation injection in an industrial accident and has five days to live…unless he can get to Elysium and use advanced medical machines to cure himself.

For his follow-up to “District 9,” writer-director Neill Blomkamp has again done a satirical science-fiction. Kim Newman said in her review, “Here, he delivers the classic Aldous Huxley-George Orwell-Ray Bradbury rebel-against-a-monolithic-dystopia scenario, in the muscular, mechanoid-fetish ’80s/’90s James Cameron-Paul Verhoeven action-movie manner.”

Newman continued, “It’s beside the point that the society shown here isn’t a credible extrapolation of its imagined tech (if the medical machine existed, it would be more likely to create a world like that of In Time, where renewed health is used to keep the labouring poor at work supporting the rich folk). This future is a bitter cartoon of the way things are right now: most of the world lives in squalour — either unemployed or doing dirty, dangerous, ill-paid jobs — while the 2001-look silver wheel Elysium hangs tantalisingly visible in the sky.”

It takes courage for a modern, Hollywood-made film to be boldly in favor of illegal immigration and socialized medicine – definitely, the plot is about the sick third-world people desperate to go to a rich giant (i.e., America) in order to use medical facilities. Newman cautioned, “Watch the Obama hatred ignite on the IMDb comments threads for Elysium to get a sense of Blomkamp’s ambitions in an era when most science-fiction blockbusters can too easily be mistaken for toy commercials or military recruitment films. There’s little to the easy, privileged, lounging-on-the-lawn elite life of Elysium, though Blomkamp gives thought to grubby-handed doers like an icy Jodie Foster and a weaselly William Fichtner, who have to keep the money flowing in and the unwashed firmly out. However, the satirical barbs (which include RoboCop-style polite but murderous law droids) are packed between bursts of bleeding-edge movie action and dollops of soap opera about sick kids and saintly nurses. Alice Braga, the go-to angel of worldwide collapses, repeats the act she did in Blindness and I Am Legend, representing the humane values the compromised hero has to preserve. Sharlto Copley (who seems about two feet taller here than in his other films) is more entertaining as the Worst Of Both Worlds, an Elysium agent who lives on Earth because the world-spanning, rubble-strewn refugee camp gives him more opportunities to kill and ravage.”

Newman continued, “Using hand-held, grubby, jittery camera style and extremely polished CGI, Blomkamp stages extraordinary, visceral moments: a robot blown apart and disassembled in slo-mo by a percussion grenade, a character having his face grown back after it’s been blasted off. As in District 9, Blomkamp and company really think through the design of this world — the Amstrad-level computer-screen displays, the contrast between sleek Elysium shuttles and grungy people-smuggling ships.” It’s persistent and rigid in politics, but doesn’t go too far in characterization – Matt Damon is good as a head-shaved cyborg having an exoskeleton with a flash-drive in his head containing access codes in his brain, but Max is still a simplistic character. There should be a moment of disappointment when he gets to the place, he’s wanted to go his entire life and finds it’s just a satellite version of Beverly Hills, but at that time we’re too busy in crash-landing shoot-out mood for it to sink in.

Not perfect, but way more satisfying of an Earth dying film than “Oblivion” or “After Earth.” It is a little more predictable than “District 9,” but confirms Blomkamp as one of the best potential science-fiction of the decade. The film came out in 2013.

After seeing “District 9,” I guess you could say that this was trying to be just like that. However, I do have the say that despite it feeling like a copy, I still found myself enjoying it. I don’t think I have ever seen a Matt Damon movie that I didn’t like, maybe because I have enjoyed every movie he has been in. Despite it may not being a good movie, Damon has never disappointed in his roles. This film is no exception because I really enjoyed this one a lot. Especially the look of Elysium, even though it may not be anything new and extraordinary. Check this one and see for yourself.

Well, now we have reached the end of “Matt Damon Month.” I hope everyone enjoyed it. Stay tuned next month to see what I will review next.