A more mainstream Blomkamp and an ever dependable Damon

Rating: Null/10 (30 September 2013)

Word has long been out that "District 9" South African director Niell Blokamp, lured to Hollywood expectedly by big budget, has conformed to a degree to its mainstream filmmaking. Flashes of brilliance are still there although the allegory has become less subtle and the general presentation less innovative and risk taking. The grounds of this epic sci-fi are all familiar, a fatally wounded Earth, not by apocalyptic events like nuclear war or natural disasters like comet hit, but through human stupidity that escalated population growth, poverty and disease in exponential proportions.
The key message, the social disease of polarization of wealth and poverty, is driven home in no uncertain terms, not by something as ingenious as in "In time", but explicitly through visual image of the titular object, which gives a literal ring to the familiar idiom of "pie in the sky". A most illustrious critic describes it as a Mercedes-Benz logo, which is not wrong but missing the point, failing to mention the key aspect of the wheel-shape space paradise – physics lessons that grade school kids may already know. The spinning wheel is to create center of gravity. Those who have seen Stanley Kubrick's all-time classic "2001" would remember the protagonist jogging along the inside circle, which would be up-side-down from the POV of the center of the wheel. Elysium is pretty much the same, but unimaginably bigger, with the inside strip populated by plush mansions, gardens, parks, even small lakes.
The plot is straightforward, and not particularly smart, surrounding a pod-like device on Elysium into which you can place a very ill and-or injured individual, close the lid, press a button and in two seconds, he or she comes out whole. Among the horde of people wishing to go to Elysium are the protagonist, an earthy (this word acquiring an added, literal meaning here) factory worker (Matt Damon) who just got exposed to radioactivity during work and has 5 days to live and his love interest's (Alice Braga) little daughter with leukemia. Not wanting them, or anyone else from ghetto Earth for that matter, to pollute this paradise is its absolutely ruthless defense secretary (Jodie Foster). The rest, even when there is a lot, are bells and whistles – nothing you have not seen before in a Hollywood sci-fi.
Despite the weak plot which basically parades our protagonist through all kinds of pain, physical and emotional – the classic suffering hero personified – this movie is quite watchable. Blomkamp delivers in the visual department, as expected of him. Acting is good too, led by Damon who has grown to inhabit this kind of character with his likability in such a way they Hollywood would always turn to him as the first choice. Alice Braga, after "I am legend" (2007), Predators (2010) and now this may be on her way to become some sort of Queen of Sci-fi and I suspect a majority of sec-fi audiences would like it. To be perfectly honest, the poor script doesn't give much to Foster to do other than to look terrible. Foster doing just that is certainly an asset to this movie.