Elysium

Synopsis: It’s the mid-22nd century. Earth is a filthy, overpopulated, crime-ridden hell-hole which has been abandoned by its wealthiest citizens for an orbiting space space station, Elysium. Max DeCosta (Matt Damon) is an ex-con on parole working in a cyborg-making factory. After a workplace accident he has to find a way to get to Elysium in order to access its highly advanced medical facilities.

In the same vein as Neill Blomkamp’s quite highly regarded District 9 Elysium is, more or less, a futuristic action thriller about humans living in a militarized ghetto who have to fight an evil multi-national corporation for their survival.  Clearly this is not my kind of fodder and if being much of muchness with futuristic action thrillers in general, at least Elysium has some semblance of an idea driving it, even if that constitutes only a small percentage of what is on screen.

What is on screen is admittedly impressive. Blomkamp is a visual effects whizz-kid and the depiction of the degraded slum conditions on Earth and the flawless perfection of Elysium above, is marvelously well-realized.  And the action sequences are well-enough handled if over-reliant on sleight-of-hand editing. The problem is that the visual effects and the action pretty much accounts for the film. The plot is generic good vs evil, we-know-who’s-gonna-win stuff and there’s a highly sentimentalized sub-plot with Max having to save a photogenic childhood friend (Alice Braga) with a terminally-ill daughter.

Of course, Max is going to save the day and frankly, there’s a limit to many times you'll want to watch him duke it out with his oddly South African accented nemesis (Sharlto Copley) to the accompaniment of a thunderingly percussive soundtrack. That comes around the 90 minute mark, with a lot more duking and thundering to come.

Jodie Foster appears (also oddly accented) as a ruthless schemer but her performance is one-note and the political intriguing never gets beyond the basic “I’ll wear the pants around here” scenario, something which, needless to say she comes to regret. It's a bit of a casting blunder as we can't help but expect more of such a fine performer.  And Matt Damon is Matt Damon. What’s not to like about that? True but he's done better work in better films than this. And that pretty much is what one wants to ask: "with so much talent at work why wasn't this film better than it is?"

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