Starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Now that Neill Blomkamp has two features to his credit, his filmmaking traits and tendencies can be fairly assessed. Regrettably for the Vancouver-based writer-director, its apparent that, at this point, his work is the product of an incredible imagination undermined by unfortunate laziness. Just as District 9 surely one of the unlikeliest Oscar nominees ever abandoned its intriguing Apartheid allusions in favour of conventional chase sequences, Elysium crafts an elaborate speculative future only to have its climax hinge on someone running a simple Find and Replace search.
Such boneheaded plotting wouldnt be so disappointing if Blomkamp didnt dazzle us first. The Los Angeles of 2154 that hes envisioned is astonishingly rich in terms of both aesthetics and atmosphere. Grimy and graffiti-scrawled, its home to the unfortunate souls whove been left behind on an over-populated, highly-polluted Earth while the elite have retreated to Elysium, a sterile satellite colony.
When blue collar worker Max (Matt Damon) suffers radiation poisoning, he schemes to infiltrate the orbiting utopia and make use of its miraculous medical technology. However, the Secretary of Defence (Jodie Foster) doesnt take kindly to undocumented guests and dispatches a sadistic mercenary (Sharlto Copley) to intercept him.
Gracelessly grafting unsophisticated commentary concerning immigration and health care onto a story thats already struggling to balance caper and political coup elements, Blomkamp only succeeds in reducing his film into a stitched-together, lumbering beast. He has an impressive eye for both minor details and grand spectacle but hasnt yet developed an aptitude for the structure and mechanics that ultimately allow a film to become a formidable piece of storytelling. Curtis Woloschuk
