DIEGO LUNA, MATT DAMON AND WAGNER MOURA IN ELYSIUM

The future is a hell of a mess

In the movie world of the South African director Neill Blomkamp, whose 2009 District 9 was a surprise hit that got four Oscar nominations, the future, clearly, is dystopian. Actually, it's a huge social and political nightmare where whatever injustices we suffer have been brutally magnified. In District 9, aliens ironically marooned in South Africa (where Blomkamp hails from) were kept penned up in impoverished shantytowns very much like that country's apartheid townships. In Blomkamp's new movie (with five times the budget of his first), LA, by part-for-the-whole logic presumably representing the whole planet, is one vast favela, a teeming slum. Even little Max (Maxwell Perry Cotton) and his childhood girlfriend Frey (Valentina Giron), who will grow up to be Matt Damon and Alice Braga (of City of God), speak Spanish, and need a bath. Hovering over them is the place where everybody would rather be, a circular man-made satellite that from a distance looks rather like the Mercedes Benz logo. It's called Elysium, which sounds like a posh housing development, and in fact it's like a large gated community. It's where the rich and fortunate live. We don't learn much more about it except that the big houses, with their pools and their lawns, are each equipped with what's called a Medipod, which looks like a domed tanning bed, but frees whoever lies inside it from all illness and physical damage. Healthcare down on earth sucks. It's not a pleasant situation, and Elysium is not a pleasant movie. It's loud, violent, dirty, and cruel. It's not remotely believable and it's no fun. It does provide Matt Damon with a heroic role, and Jodie Foster with a villainous one. If you insist on watching, look for a small-screen cinema and sit toward the back. It's an ear-splitting, jittery movie.

Blomkamp, who both directed and wrote the plot-hole-ridden screenplay, still has an eagerness and hunger to him. There is an edge to the action scenes. Damon must have welcomed the challenge. He has to go around shaven-headed and tattooed, dying of radiation sickness and loaded down with mechanical exoskeletal machinery that's attached directly to his bones. Jodie Foster, who goes by the moniker Delacourt, is a real ice queen. She speaks French (more haughty than Spanish) and is in charge of security for Elysium, but bent on world, or at least satellite, domination for herself. The whole setup reminds me of Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, where if I recall the enforcer-lady sitting at glittering computer consoles is called Julia and played by Andrea Riseborough. The planet there, as in After Earth, had gone further downhill. That's three dystopia movies just in the past five months. There may be more. I wonder how people keep track of them.

Elysium may in its way be the most memorable of these three; it's certainly more "angry and alive" (Anthony Lane's words). But while District 9 was crude and preposterous, it had a specificity and depth of character development Elysium lacks. We never get to know any of the fancy people who live on Elysium. Blomkamp makes the mistake of many sci-fi movies: he spends most of our time between worlds rather than in one. He also manipulates simple cliches -- with zero sense of humor. There's the setup where the child Max is told by his benevolent Latina convent nanny that he's destined for greatness, a moment rerun near the end to tell us he's gotten there. We may need that because his success looks a lot like failure. How granting everybody in LA (or on earth?) affordable (and sci-fi perfect) health care will solve their myriad social problems is moot. Blomkamp (Lane again) "remains more gripped by setup than by resolution."

Indeed the most memorable scenes are of Max early on. A former car thief on parole, he's gone straight and ironically works on a factory line making the brutal robots that function as the town's (planet's?) policemen. When they haul him unjustifiably before a parole officer, he (that) too is a robot, but painted like an old-fashioned doll. His mean factory boss (Blomkamp is nothing if not unsubtle) forces him into a dangerous zone of the factory where he gets a dose of radiation that gives him five days to live. It's then that he calls on his soulful old pal Julio (Diego Luna) and his old criminal cohort Spider (Wagner Moura) for help in getting to Elysium and diving into a Medipod to have his life back. Who should be linked back up with him right around this time but his long-lost girlfriend Frey (Braga), now a nurse supplied with a cute, sad young daughter (Matilda: Emma Tremblay) dying of leukemia. Her only hope too is a Medipod. And of course there are some super-baddies, rogue hirelings of Delacourt from South Africa, led by Kruger (Sharlto Copley), whose high-pitched accent casts him for most of us as the most alien critter on screen. There's a higher-level white collar baddie, John Carlyle (William Fichtner), inside whose loathsome head are embedded all the computer codes of Elysim, which Spider wants to get downloaded to Max's brain so he can open up the closed world up above. Call it benign world-domination. Maybe.

Spider is a grubby madman who inhabits a graffitti-filled warehouse full of computer screens, exemplifying the usual assumption of dystopian sci-fi films that in future-world, hi-tech sophistication easily coexists with every other kind of physical degradation -- and total mess. As Spider, Moura sputters and raves almost incomprehensibly. He's behind Max's being fitted with the elaborate mechanical-encrusted-on-the-human gadgetry that miraculously is able to turn him from a man totally enfeebled by radiation sickness into a superhero. "Will it hurt?" he asks before this far-fetched retrofit. Yes, it will. But somehow while Max screams with pain at lots of other times (howls that harmonize with the movie's wealth of F-words), he's quiet for this operation, drilling into the bone and all, and it does its job. He's good to go.

I wasn't. I couldn't buy Damon in this role, or Foster, or Braga, or least of all the campy overacting Copley. I liked Diego Luna, and was glad to see him back again, however briefly. But that wasn't enough to get me through this movie in any comfort. I give Blomcamp credit for inflicting authentic pain -- to the viewer. And it's clear that despite the haze created by all the extra money he had this time, which of course means lots of CGI and niftier robots, Blomcamp still cares about what he's doing. It didn't work for me, though.

Elysium was released in the US 9 August 2013; UK, 21 August.

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*I forgot World War Z.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.