Elysium (MA). Director: Neill Blomkamp. Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Diego Luna. 109 minutes
Blomkamp is a blockbuster filmmaker with a social conscience. In his previous film, District 9, an alien invasion morphed into a vast (in)humanitarian crisis when the new arrivals were forced to live in slum-like conditions outside apartheid-era Johannesburg. The South African filmmaker's Hollywood follow-up Elysium is set in a dystopian future where the gap between rich and poor has been exacerbated by ecological disaster; now the elite one per cent live in a snap-sealed space-bound paradise called Elysium, while the impoverished 99 per cent remain below on a polluted and overpopulated earth, in crowded, decrepit cities and toiling in dangerous blue collar jobs.
These are extremely good, issues-based sci-fi premises that in both instances Blomkamp spends too quickly. District 9 used a documentary format in its first ten minutes to spell out its most interesting idea, which was a comment on how we treat the refugees who arrive among us. Elysium is even quicker to spill the beans; within its opening seconds it has told its audience via bold captions everything that it needs to know about this world; of the elevation of the rich literally beyond the reach of the rest. It then progresses to a reasonably engaging but straightforward action-driven story, that draws some obvious moral points from its potent premise.
Its hero is ex-con Max (Damon), who is compelled by circumstances to enlist the services of a people smuggler, Julio (Luna), to try to get him to Elysium. To achieve this he must overcome the aggressive defenses employed by sinister bureaucrat Delacourt (Foster), head of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (another throwback to apartheid-era South Africa), which is charged with protecting Elysium from earthling invasions. In particular, Max must evade CCB foot soldier Krueger, a violent and technologically advanced maniac played gleefully by Copley.
Like District 9, Elysium, once the headier concepts are out of the way, is loudly and proudly an action film. Blomkamp and his team have clearly had fun coming up with futuristic gadgetry and increasingly devastating weapons (the violence in Elysium is pretty brutal at times) to be used by heroes and villains alike. The action sequences, and Elysium itself (which lines the inner rim of a massive wheel-shaped satellite), are impressively realised. There are some nice, blackly-comic digs at the interactions between humans and technology (see Max trying to reason with