"Elysium," or, Matt Damon Becomes a Thumb Drive

When I first saw the trailer for Elysium, the new film by Neill Blomkamp, the writer/director of District 9 (a movie I very much enjoyed), I was intrigued. I'll watch pretty much anything with Matt Damon, but this looked particularly promising, a sort of sci-fi take on his Bourne escapades: Matt Damon, Robot-Man, Punches All the Things. What wouldn't be awesome about that?

Spoilers abound after the break...

Sadly, Elysium is a mess. Unlike District 9, which I thought was a deft political analogy and wonderfully character-driven, Elysium is morally uncomplicated and sloppily executed, a cinematic middle-finger to the 1% that beats you over the head with its righteous anger while providing no compelling character arcs. Everyone here is either very good or very bad; the baldly-stated motivations would make Snidely Whiplash plead for a little subtlety. 

Many things about the story just don't make sense: how will "rebooting" a computer system offer systemic social change? how can a machine put a man's face back together yet be unable to save the hero from a...computer virus? and why, since his shirt was clearly cut off when the metal exoskeleton thing was attached, does Damon have his shirt back on when he wakes up? (This last is clearly the most troubling logical problem.)

Where did you come from, accursed fabric?

The rules of the universe aren't very clear. The robot suit clearly makes Damon's character Max stronger, but there's no explanation of how that works (or how he survives the grotesque operation that installs it). At some level the suits are bionic, as they're wired to a person's neural network (I think?), but that doesn't appear to give the person wearing them any advantage, even in really obvious situations where it could, such as for flying computer-based helicopters. The titular paradise's rules are also unclear: the central conceit is that a software "reboot" could serve as a political coup to place someone in power, so I guess the basic system is dictatorial rather than vote-based. There are still employees on Elysium who work, which raises the question: if it's a paradise for the ultra-rich, why are there still people on it slaving away for The Man? If only there were answers.

These things I could forgive, or at least accept, if there were good character work involved. (Or, if it were more like Pacific Rim and had just amazing punching.) That was District 9's big strength: following Wikus's transformation both literal and figurative as he became the very thing that he had most loathed. Sure, the political allegory was heavy-handed -- RACISM IS BAD YOU GUYS! -- but the strength of its intimate, deeply personal story arc made up for that. Alas, there's basically no character development in Elysium, even for its central hero Max. He's a basically decent guy who's hit hard times (along with the rest of Earth, apparently) and is in love with his childhood friend Frey, a nurse whose daughter is dying. So he stays, even after he becomes first Robotic Punching Matt Damon and then Thumb Drive Matt Damon. Frey is never anything but beautiful, good, and self-sacrificing. Jodie Foster's character is selfish and evil, and her goons are rapey thugs with a taste for excessive violence. Everyone's a type; no one is a person.

The Wailing Woman of Soundtrack Sorrow that cues up as the final act ensues is a good sign that the film is taking the easy emotional way out; in my opinion, the WWoSS hasn't been well-deployed since Gladiator. We're supposed to feel like the world's been saved at the end, but the film really hasn't done anything to develop that promise: people can be very selfish, particularly a space-neighborhood full of the rich and spoiled, and a computer reboot ain't gonna change that. Not even with Matt Damon in a robot suit.