Movie Reviews: Elysium

Opening in Los Angeles in 2154, Elysium (15A) offers an especially dystopian vision of Earth’s future.

Those who can afford to have abandoned the irreversibly polluted planet to live in an idyllic environment aboard the space station, Elysium; those who can’t are left behind to work themselves to death on behalf of the gilded few. Max (Matt Damon) is a factory worker who constructs the robots that police the planet. When he is poisoned by radiation at work in an accident which leaves him with only days to live, Max vows to do whatever is required to reach Elysium and obtain a cure. Meanwhile, Elysium’s steely head of security, Delacourt (Jodie Foster), has not only declared a secret war against the poverty-stricken refugees who attempt to illegally land on the space station, but is also plotting a coup to oust the liberal politicians who run Elysium. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp shot to fame with the sci-fi hit District 9 (2009), and while Elysium is less inventive and visually arresting than that movie, it’s still an entertaining and imaginative action flick. The plight of illegal immigrants is central to the plot, but Blomkamp is equally fascinated by that quasi-philosophical staple of the sci-fi movie, humanity’s ever-changing relationship with machines. Max, with Damon in his most persuasive action-man persona since the Bourne movies, evolves from building robots to becoming half-man, half-machine when he is wired into a robotic exo-skeleton in order to rescue humanity from its worst excesses. The characters around Max are less fully realised — it may well be intentional that Foster plays the fascistic Delacourt as if she were herself a robot — but their shortcomings are more than compensated for by the pulsating story. After a summer of disappointing blockbusters, Elysium finally delivers the adrenaline rush we’ve been craving.