Welcome to the future. Rich folks still hate immigrants. Only now they have a novel solution – instead of building a fence to keep the trash out, C. Montgomery Burns and Co. built their own space station to move away from the rabble. Not in my backyard? That backyard is now millions of cubic miles of dead space. Try graffiti-ing that, losers!
Back in Jr. High, I was given a choice to study one of two foreign languages: Spanish or French. I chose the former, reasoning that a Californian would have much more use for Spanish. And here we are in 2154, and so long as you are tethered to California, Spanish is indeed a much more useful language. It’s practically the only language left here. If your wealth exceeds your imagination, however … well, you’re better off learning French for Elysium. It never occurred to me that my Jr. High choice pitted the pedestrian against the egalitarian. I bet the Parisian street fair people I met this summer would love to learn that fact.
Max (Matt Damon) is your average ex-con in future LA, which looks a lot like the slums in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. Matt himself is bald and tattooed, a look we haven’t seen on him since EuroTrip. Don’t, however, expect him to break into “Scotty Doesn’t Know” anytime soon. Max is waiting for the bus when The Man comes a harrassin’. The Man has taken the form of robotic cops who break Max’s forearm when he gets cute. You know, most of us watching the video of the Rodney King beating thought it was horrible; a select few thought he got what he deserved, but at least one of us looked at that video and said, “someday, this will all be done by machine.” When he reports to work, Max is docked ½ a day’s pay and almost fired on the spot for delinquency/infirmity. His job? He’s an assembly line worker piecing together the kind of robots that broke his 
arm. Oh, the irony. Given a choice of “get in there or lose your job,” Max contracts radiation poisoning and suddenly has five days to live. He has to get to Elysium, where, I kid you not, every.single.household has a save-your-life personal rejuvenation cure-all-ills tanning booth. Earth, apparently, lacks them.
You would think that fatal radiation poisoning would slow somebody down a little, but luckily Max knows a guy (Diego Luna) – a guy with an agenda – and suddenly Max is an unstoppable cyborg. Ok, we’re not dealing on planes of reality here – while I can easily accept the destruction of unions and robot fuzz and evil Jodie Foster cleansing herself of peasantry and L.A. as one giant ghetto, the entire picture is more than a little skewed. Elysium is thinly veiled metaphor for our immigration woes. As such, it’s just about one more good idea and some decent action scenes away from greatness. All the fighting, and there’s a lot of it, is all in that shaky hand-held camera format. I consistently fail to see the value of such.
A film like this says less about the actual plight of the unwashed masses than how we perceive the rich feel about them. Yes, we are comfortable with the idea that rich people would actually build a space station and leave earth just so they don’t have to converse with the poor. You have to believe that people powerful enough and obnoxious enough to separate themselves from the Earth itself probably would have neither sympathy nor any trouble keeping out the Earthlings below … which kinda renders the whole plot a tad on the silly side. But entertaining silly, not Pacific Rim silly.
The rich shoot themselves into space
Creating their own heavenly grace
The rabble aroused
Planning espoused
“Now how do we get into that place?”
Rated R, 109 Minutes
D: Neill Blomkamp
W: Neill Blomkamp
Genre: Our pathetic future
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Union!
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Racial profiling enthusiasts
