Review
ELYSIUM: Simultaneously Fascinating and Flawed Sci-Fi
Perhaps the problem is an excess of ambition, which concerned not only properly creating the earthly vale in a defined future, but also meeting the expectations of viewers.
Elysium, another dystopian blockbuster has appeared on screens in 2013 – the season began with Joseph Kosinski and his Oblivion, and ended with the long-awaited work of Neill Blomkamp. During the hot summer we dealt with several unusual visions of the future, that is the disappointing After Earth, the very promising (but poor in the end) The Purge and the excellent Pacific Rim, which can be taken as a picture grappling with some kind of humanity’s future, this time fighting kaiju. Five films, each different – playing with the sco-fi convention differently, creating their characters differently, polished visually in a different way. Each, however, consistent, concrete, distinctive and signed by a creator who knew what he wanted to achieve and how.
The effects of these efforts, obviously, did not always go hand in hand with expectations – a pile of intriguing elements met with quite cliché solutions, which caused a whole lot of unpleasant grating, for example in Shyamalan’s film, but similar narrative weaknesses were also noticeable in the much-praised by me Oblivion and Pacific Rim, which of course had their flaws, but in the context of a pleasant whole were quite unnoticeable. Elysium follows a similar path, offering a spectacular journey, with a cool captain at the helm, but without the thrills and unpredictable craziness of the previous voyage to the land of prawns.
Despite this, it is definitely the most ambitious of 2013’s voyages. Blomkamp’s boat is this time more polished. A hundred-million-dollar boat – a microscopic budget for a spectacle of this scale! – looks like at least a two-hundred-million-dollar colossus, which conceptually crushes everything that appeared on screens in 2103. And it is not about scale, spectacularity and a fireworks display of special effects, which are supposed to excite so strongly that every few minutes you pick your jaw off the floor (the case of Pacific Rim), but the complexity of the presented world, which consists of clearly marked – or simply present – layers: political, social, economic, moral.
Neill Blomkamp thus confirms that he is faithful to science fiction not only in its entertaining dimension, but tries to go much deeper, embracing the future more broadly, without forgetting about the audiovisual orgy he should deliver to viewers – and he does. Careful penetration of the world of the future – in its sociological dimension – seems to be a characteristic feature of the director from South Africa. Already District 9 suddenly offered something incredibly fresh in the ossified ideas of science fiction. The prawn ghetto was after all a clear analogy to African slums, whose inhabitants are treated like subhumans, like a lower, worse race, systematically prepared for disposal.
However, Blomkamp was not concerned with commenting on the situation and ethical deliberations, but with pure-blooded action placed against this intriguing background. With Elysium he returns to similarly neglected suburbs – in the year 2154 Los Angeles resembles Brazilian favelas, districts of poverty and local gangsters, with millions of people on squalid streets rotting in the ruins of today’s urban architecture; with billions of similarly vegetating second-class citizens, stuck helplessly in overcrowded cities, with unemployment as a normal state and technology legitimizing the existence and rule of the upper class, here living in a state of permanent happiness on the space station (?) Elysium.
Blomkamp draws here a noticeable division. They, the bad ones, distancing themselves from dirt, helplessness, exploiting the poor, wallowing in luxury, not aging, curable of every possible disease, versus we, the beggars, vegetating on the streets, in ruined housing estates, severely punished for insubordination, sick, dying. The dichotomy of the presented world is very clear, outlined clearly and siding with those who are presented as defenseless – as Blomkamp himself says, this kind of asymmetrical sensitivity results not so much from his personal experiences as a victim of the South African mentality, but from the realization of how the world is constructed at the moment of cooperation of both sides.
In South Africa, blacks are still second-class citizens despite the image victory (Mandela), and whites, despite lowering their tone in the context of racial superiority, are still considered masters controlling the lives of their subordinates. Such a world, whose bipolar construction is practically repeatable everywhere, shaped Blomkamp’s sensitivity and directed his interests. Of course, ideologically, such a socialist stench, demanding equality, is noticeable, all the more because the whole film is interspersed with postcards of the plebs, diseases and feudal relations taken straight from a positivist novella by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
Moreover, the main character is John Doe – a resident of one of thousands of poor districts, lucky enough to have a job in a factory where a nineteenth-century grind prevails. This is a world of the future, but as if strongly backward, dirty, dressed in rags, stuck with roots in a petrified past. Strongly noticeable, fortunately, is the satire in the initial moments – robots are shown that do not feel sarcasm, do not understand humor, accurately guess ambiguity in the voice, easily recognize intentions. Good. Too bad it’s just a moment.
Because the whole rest does not have such a clear identity. Blomkamp, despite ambitions, knows that contemporary SF feeds primarily on action. The guy entered the world of cinema straight from the computer game industry, where he was responsible, among other things, for the promotion of Halo and realizes the demands of today’s audience – spectacular shootouts, weapons, chases are the standard whims he tries to meet, which he does quite well (and this despite the fact that the most spectacular scenes were sold in clips and trailers). And that is why social inclinations quickly give way to classic action.
It is energetic, inventive, with the right cool-factor and this despite the most irritating disease of Hollywood, that is the incredibly shaky camera. Blomkamp thus lets go of a more detailed look at life on Elysium, which is shown in short, insignificant shots, but also on Earth, which is as if entirely immersed in the sewage of lawlessness and that’s it. A pity. Matt Damon fits perfectly into the scheme of lesser ambitions, who – of course – is the prophesied The One. Really, he is the one, dreaming of Paradise in the sky and… guess what. His role perfectly illustrates what we are dealing with in Elysium , when the socio-political decorations are pulled from the stage – the portrait is trivial, shallow and unfortunately pretending to be more than it really is.
Melodramatic reminiscences and sentimental clichés are crushing, and Blomkamp offers them in the prologue, they appear several times in between and are the emotional basis of the finale (oh dear, meerkats and a hippo!). Similarly looks the role of Jodie Foster, who plays a bitchy Secretary of Defense – honestly her motivations were healthy, however the character evolved into quite a pathetic conspiring caricature. Equally grotesque is the character of the secret agent, brilliantly played by Sharlto Copley – a strange accent, violence, brutality, physical fitness and mental darkness, which suddenly turns into a flash of genius.
I buy this character in its entirety despite the repeated oddities of various personality traits. Kruger deserves his own film – he is the type of appropriately attractive bastard whose past demands closer exploration. Elysium turns out to be a dichotomy of impressions – on the one hand it has a fascinating and original background, which corresponds with Blomkamp’s experience, and on the other it goes along with the worst film stereotypes of this world, which simply disappoints, sometimes less (tearful prologue), sometimes more (hopeless finale).
Perhaps the problem is an excess of ambition, which concerned not only properly creating the earthly vale in a defined future, but also meeting the expectations of viewers. Here Blomkamp partially failed, offering great action but supplemented with irritating, mawkish melodramatic threads. So we boarded the polished boat Elysium, which has a cool captain who knows in which direction and where he is sailing, but instead of sailors’ chants, he hums to himself. Stunned, I listen and cannot believe my ears. With such a strange feeling I left the cinema.
