Set in the year 2154, when the very wealthy live on a man-made space station Elysium while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth, a man (Matt Damon) takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarised worlds. The story and its assortment of diverse characters, locations and vernacular might seem complicated at first, but like switching from automatic to gears, once Elysium shifts into fifth gear everything falls into place and all hell breaks loose.
All's fun in war and love in Blomkamp's utopia; the romance is sentimental and the warfare brutal. This head-on clash between gushy emotions and physical prowess drives Elysium with passion and vigour. It is unrelenting in its pursuit of providing ultimate entertaining escapism that is explosive.
Blomkamp infuses Elysium with a "Ja Boet" South Africanism to the point of ridicule; particularly Sharlto Copley (Blomkamp's childhood friend and the star of District 9) who re-teams with the director to take on the pivotal and villainous role of ex-Special Forces Kruger. Copley takes his character and his loaded Afrikaans accent to the extreme, playing Kruger like a pre-apartheid policeman on a path of vengeance.
Copley succeeded in drawing on his own unique experiences to create the character; although the character wasn't written as a South African, Copley drew on two South African stereotypes to try to create a unique character as we've never seen before; for his accent and sarcastic humour Copley drew on these guys from "The South" - a tough neighbourhood south of Joburg, and for the military aspect, Kruger's beard, PT shorts and his utterly lethal military ability was inspired by the South African Defence Force during the apartheid years - in particular 32 Battalion, a notorious but highly respected battalion that fought in Angola during the Bush War, trying to stop the spread of communism in Africa.
This might infuriate some and is starkly contrasted with the futuristic world Blomkamp creates in Elysium, but others will shriek with laughter. Copley's comical portrayal is further supported by Brandon Auret's brawny Drake; the duo forms an amusing radical pact. Copley and Auret's partnership stands in conflicted contrast with the heavily accentuated Americanism of Matt Damon, who plays Max, a man at the centre of the chaos on Earth, between the two worlds, and Jodie Foster's assertive official who is determined to protect Elysium for the wealthy.
Is Elysium Blomkamp as a filmmaker, who left South Africa for Canada, now taking on his Canadian persona to ridicule apartheid South Africa? Although Blomkamp admits that he opposes "too serious topics", Elysium is serious and hard core fun; its spectacular context and visual splendour embrace serious and afflicted issues that are violent and excessive, almost as if he is using his tools (and power) as a filmmaker to wage his own personal war. At its heart, Elysium deals head-on with apartheid in the future, where the destitute residue of a third world becomes slaves to pristine white oppressors. It is also a world where children in a real, poverty-stricken world, suffer due to the oppression, and the wealthy benefit from better housing, and medical schemes in their "false" utopia.
Elysium shows that although the Mad-Maxian world is overrun by computers and vicious militant androids and machines (as is the world of digital filmmaking and visual effects), everything can change drastically with a simple download. It's all about the human factor, where humanity combats technology. Blomkamp makes it clear that beauty is not only skin deep, and that underneath its artificial veneer of perfection lays corrupted evil that erodes humanity.
There's a lot happening in Elysium (on and off screen) and, as with recent Sci-Fi epics like Oblivion, classic masterworks like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner are sadly missed. Elysium will definitely thrill District 9 followers and provides ideal entertainment for anyone looking for fun escapism with loaded intention.
"I want to blow things up as much as I want to make films that are about serious topics," Blomkamp said. "I'm more of a visual artist than anything else. I don't want to make movies that are too serious - I like action and visual imagery, and that's where it starts for me. But I'm also interested in politics, so once I've set up the world and start getting into character and story, the political ideas that intrigue me work their way in there. The subjects that interest me tend to be large, sociological concepts, and I like the idea of making films about those concepts in ways that aren't heavy handed or preachy - I hope that putting these topics in a science-fiction setting will let the audience look at them from a different perspective. The most important thing to me is that the movie is entertaining, but I like to put a worthwhile story underneath, so it isn't just pure popcorn."
Just as District 9 explored ideas of social justice, class separation, and race relations, Elysium asks important questions about where we are now in a context of where we are going. "The entire film is an allegory," he said. "I tend to think a lot about the topic of wealth discrepancy and how that affects immigration, and I think the further we go down the path that we are on, the more the world will represent the one in Elysium. In that sense, I think the questions that underlie the film are quite accurate."
Go behind the scenes of Elysium at www.writingstudio.co.za/page1037.html.
