Elysium (2013)

Elysium (PG-13) - Review

"More Cyber-Junk than Cyber-Punk"

Not content with the Racial equality parable of District 9, director Neill Blomkamp turns his sites on Mexican-American immigration reform for this overwhelmingly underwhelming SciFi snoozer starring Mat Damon as Max, a misunderstood misanthrope in a brown man's world with only days to live and interplanetary habitats to reach and get magically healed by.

Blomkamp sticks with the bluecollar ethos that made D9 so successful, albeit this time with a Hollywood megastar and a bunch of thinly veiled stabs at US foreign policy, immigration policy, Blackwater soldiering and corporational politics.  You see everyone up in the Orbital station known as Elysium gets free unlimited magical health care pods (wasn't that also in Prometheus, and what the GOP doesn't want?), and only the richest get to buy a ticket to live there.  Everyone on Earth lives and works and gets cancer in Big Mexico (whats left of SoCal), the Elysium people just send down robots and shuttle pods to keep the Have Nots under control.  Then comes Max, a former car thief now reformed factory worker who dreams of one day taking the ride up to Elysium but when Max gets filled with radiation at work due to workplace neglicence (Workman's comp apparently also is only available on Elysium) he must now reach the station and maybe change the situations of millions of his Earthbound brethern.

Every on Earth speaks Spanish and English, while everyone in orbit speaks English and French and attends lawn parties all day and don't work.  How this economy is sustained, what is the basis of law and order and the constitution, why humans (rich and poor) would totally submit to robotic computer control that can be changed with a couple of lines of C++  are all questions that go unanswered in Elysium.  The film is a very thin premise stretched to only an hour and a half, with no big action movie payoffs to stave off the eye rolling shmaltz.  Jodie Foster retains the current Queen of SciFi status with her role as Space Margret Thatcher, who explodes refugee boats with impunity and will implement a coup if anyone argues with her strangely over acted weirdly dubbed space accent.  She hires Kruger (Sharlto Copley, the hero of District 9) as her blackops monster, and his miscasting in the role is just outright terrible.  Sharlto's bad guy wears a exoskeleton, wears fur blankets, sneers and bumbles along waving a samurai sword in the worst kind of SyFy Tv special cliche (use a gun jack hole!).  It's not his fault, its the script, written by Blomkamp, which is such a drastic reversal from District 9's hopeful breakout.  The story is so filled with holes (like the Spider character however), so many wretchedly nauseating flash backs to the golden years of youth, so many "why would he do that, why would that happen" moments, so much promise of Cyber-punk body modification and human/computer scientific theory so mishandled and without gravitas it feels the scriptwriter doesn't even understand the basics of the genre and also so without the clear clean visuals of D9 that are instead replaced with a shaky action cam so shoddy as to make the late great Tony Scott snort in derision.  Mostly the script is so narrow minded, it so sorely lacks a large enough scope, the film's promise so sadly unfulfilled and the entire film such a large step down from his fresh faced freshman film that Blomkamp's Elysium appears to have made the Sophomore mistake of waking up late with a face full of zits, not combing it's hair and blinking for its school picture in comparison (don't expect a nomination for best dressed or most likely to succeed for either of them).

3 Did I Really Believe Lockout's SciFi More? out of 10 (BAD)