Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
Runtime: 109 mins.
2013
I remember enjoying District 9. It felt fresh, character-driven, and deep despite the straightforwardness of its political allegory. Neill Blomkamp was going to be one to watch, especially with a blockbuster budget and Hollywood grade-A talent at his disposal.
What happened?
Elysium had a mountain of hype behind it, but its reception was lukewarm. Many people seemed to like it, and they defended it against the critiques of the malcontents. Full disclosure, I am one of the malcontents. Being disillusioned with the film, I've been thinking about why the film was generally well-received. Maybe it was the excellent special effects, or the cinematography (although I felt the pacing didn't allow me to take in any single moment). Maybe it was the detailed sci-fi worldbuilding (although I wish they would have explored that world more). Maybe it was that a big budget summer genre blockbuster had a discernible high-minded theme underpinning it (although I found that theme's presentation simple and borderline condescending).
These are all almost-merits. But I won't get into the aesthetics of the movie very much. I want to talk about how I found Elysium unsatisfactory on a basic narrative/dramatic level, and I want to do that by looking at each of the nine primary characters and their impact on the story.
(Caution: there are major spoilers in these character analyses. Only read ahead if you have seen the movie, don't want to see the movie, or don't care.)
Let's start small.
1. President Patel
It should be telling that "starting small" here indicates the character who should have the most power, the president of the 1%-catering space station, Elysium. The whole movie hinges around a coup for that very position of power, yet President Patel is absolutely impotent. He does nothing but give Defense Secretary Delacourt a tongue-lashing for murdering a bunch of people. He can't control her, and he barely tries. He is an uninteresting, powerless pawn, much like...
2. CEO John Carlyle
The head of our protagonist's company, John Carlyle, ends up being a puppet controlled by Defense Secretary Delacourt. She wants a coup, so John types up some code that will apparently reset Elysium (whatever that means?) such that Patel will be replaced by Delacourt (however that works?). Why does the CEO of a robotics company have magical coding powers?
Anyway, as with Patel, Carlyle's character is absolutely reduced to his social position--a common pitfall for allegories, and a waste of William Fichtner's talent. He is also the speaker of this hilarious line, which I imagine was supposed to come off as brusque, but really says I couldn't figure out another way to end this scene:
"Now, if you will excuse me, I have to not speak to you people any longer."
There is nothing unique or interesting about him. Other than his plot function, he also serves to draw the ire of our protagonist by not apologizing when his company accidentally radiation-poisons our protagonist. I assume an apology is what our protagonist wanted, it's not really clear.
Said protagonist attacks Carlyle later on to retrieve this valuable code, an altercation during which we witness the death of...
3. Julio
This guy is a friend of our protagonist. He's just a generally nice guy, and our protagonist enjoys his company I guess! That's all we get out of this character. Therefore we're supposed to feel bad when he is slaughtered by a certain badass mercenary, but we aren't too torn up about it. Neither is our protagonist, by all appearances, because the slaughter of his best friend does not factor into the rest of the movie either in the plot or dialogue. Easy come easy go.
He's played with amicable wide-eyed childhood innocence by Diego Luna, but sometimes amicable wide-eyed childhood innocence is not enough, as evidenced by...
4. Matilda
Much like Julio is supposed to get a pass on proper characterization because he is a cool friend, Matilda is supposed to get a pass because she is a cute child. Not just that, but a cute, terminally ill child! Her function is to spend the movie looking forlorn and untreatable, which is supposed to raise the stakes. Now our protagonist really needs to get to Elysium (although he already really needed to get there, because he also is terminally ill).
I've been fairly glib until this point, but I want to be level when I say that the thematic implications of this character upset me. Other than what is mentioned above, her role is to inspire our protagonist with an allegory of her own. She tells our captivated protagonist about a meerkat who desired some high-hanging fruits which only the big animals could reach. To get them, the meerkat stood on the hippo's back. "What's in it for the hippo?" our bewildered protagonist responds. "The hippo wants a friend," the little girl explains.
I laughed through that scene, not just because it was sentimental, but because it was the key metaphor to the entire film. That's all there is here, folks. An entire complex social structure reduced to a story that is meticulously crafted to sound like a story a child would tell. This frustrates me, because there are so many sci-fi fans out there who are tired of mindless explosion-fests, so will jump at the chance to laud any sci-fi that has any sort of high-minded thematic backbone. I'm a sci-fi fan who wants that too. But with Elysium, I don't feel like I'm being fed--I feel like I'm being pandered to.
Double spoiler alert: this film ends with our protagonist reprogramming Elysium such that everybody on earth is now also a citizen, which means that everybody can receive medical care from Elysium's robots and magic healing tanning beds--universal health care, if I may be so bold to say. It's so simple--just like Matilda's story! But doesn't this seem... off to you? If everyone in the world could be saved by Elysium's medical supplies, why didn't Elysium just share them in the first place? Was everybody there that evil? Maybe there wasn't enough to go around. In which case, all our protagonist did by making everyone a citizen was place a bandage over a wound that would reopen in a few weeks, or maybe a few days, when the tanning beds run out of juice. The best articulation of this unmentioned issue is the end of this parodist's excellent madcap recap of the movie:
But it works! The doors of Elysium are open for all! Before you know it, ship upon ship filled with sick criminals lands on Elysium. Kroger's still out there killing everyone he sees, but Hey! it's a dog-eat-dog world. It only takes FookCity two hours to run out of water, food, and electricity, after which it crashes into Earth, creating a fireball that sets the overpopulation crisis back a good twenty years.Does Elysium really have unlimited resources, and if so, again, why weren't they sharing? I admire the film for tackling such a prominent political issue, or rather I would if it weren't treated so immaturely. My issue is that Elysium's resolution only solves the surface-level issues (people on earth don't have healing beds). It doesn't even attempt to touch the real undergirding structural issues that caused the class disparity that caused the building of Elysium in the first place. Elysium is treated like the answer, which I find irresponsible because it isn't the answer--it's just another symptom of the problem. I wish Elysium were a movie about the problem.
Before you say something like, "There is only so much sci-fi can do, how complicated do you expect the themes to be?", I will stop you. I think that sort of reductive thinking about genre fiction is less prominent than it used to be, but it still exists. There is mature sci-fi out there, sci-fi that you can spend days analyzing, sci-fi with themes that you can't reduce to one paragraph. I'll cite Looper, Alien, Donnie Darko, and Moon to name a few. Hell, even Dredd's thematic complexity has Elysium beat.
Yikes. Didn't mean to get so heavy into theme-talk, but it would have been impossible to fully explain why Matilda grated on me otherwise. She's also yet another character on the long list of characters who we're supposed to care about automatically just because she is connected to our protagonist, a list that is topped by...
5. Frey
Frey is Matilda's mother, which is the only reason we have for caring about Matilda. Our protagonist has a big throbbing crush on Frey, which is the only reason we have for caring about Frey. Now, this one isn't entirely fair. Frey has a bit of agency and makes some dramatic choices early on in the film. That puts her far and above everyone else we've talked about so far. Unfortunately, about halfway through she gets captured, and gets reduced to that pervasive action movie role for the female character: the damsel in distress. For the rest of the movie, she is (usually literally) shuttled around by the men at work. This is disappointing. The character had potential.
This lost potential that results in clunking around without agency is a fate also suffered by...
6. Spider
I was sure this guy would be a major player. I thought he would be a hinge, have some sort of key influence on the story. Hell, I thought he might even be the one to steal the code and stage a coup. He certainly couldn't stop going on about how valuable that code was, and he knew exactly what it could do. He seemed to be motivated by greed and power, and his relationship with our protagonist was tenuous at best. How was this not a recipe for disaster?
Turns out his only role was to be vaguely helpful. He ended up following our protagonist around, opening doors for him... slowly... with his laptop. Then he helped out our protagonist by reprogramming the code that was meant to reprogram Elysium, which apparently just meant changing the code from: "Earth: Illegal" to "Earth: Legal" or something like that. Not kidding.
Are we noticing a trend here? Time and again, a character is set up in a perfect position to have some sort of arc or influence on the plot, and time and again this potential is squandered by the halfway point of the film.
Top it off with an inexplicably over-the-top performance by Wagner Moura.
THEY WILL HUNT YOU TO THE EDGE OF THE EARTH FOR THIS.
Not really sure why he had to shout-sneer everything. Yet his was somehow not the most inexplicably over-the-top performance...
7. Kruger
I don't want to say much about Kruger because there's not much to say. He is nothing more than a sneering musclehead who gets his kicks from being sinister and exerting power over others. His character has no characteristic that can't be summed up as "bad". Maybe that would be enjoyable in another more self-aware movie, but a movie that touts itself as high-minded can certainly do better.
And then there's the South African accent. It's ridiculous. Trying to understand it is like wading through a swamp. And the cartoonish-cackling-crooning villain impulse pushes the accent from heavy into incomprehensible. But at least he and Spider are the only ones who have laughable accents that distract from the...
8. Delacourt
Hoo boy. Jodie Foster, I am disappoint.
Her character is ruthless. No-nonsense. Cold-hearted. But by all accounts, she has no reason to be. She orders spacecraft carrying illegal immigrants to be exploded when all she had to do was arrest the passengers as soon as they land (which we see later on is actually quite easy). She plans a coup, then will do anything to cover her tracks. This is a cautious, thorough woman. Or is it? We are given no insights into her character beyond a vague monologue in which she claims her motivation is that she doesn't want the household she built to fall into the hands of the poor people. There comes a point when a social critique goes beyond on-the-nose and ends up at nonsensical.
Part of this is the writing, but unfortunately part of it is the performance. Delacourt does not carry the weight of any of the atrocities she commits. She orders death and destruction, then looks on with a bemused smirk. Her eyes contain less humanity than the eyeless candycane-colored robots that go tromping around Elysium whenever someone needs to be shot at. And her accent... what is it? An amalgamation of dialects that make no sense together, an amalgamation that fades in and out of existence over the course of the film, an amalgamation that I can only conclude is an attempt at sounding posh. Boy does she sound posh. Sometimes she even greets her fellow Elysiumians in luxurious French, while the lowly earthlings are stuck flinging Spanglish phrases at each other across their respective ghettos.
Again, the irresponsible simplicity with which Elysium paints its characters irks me. Delacourt was easily the most disappointing character, although perhaps not the most damaging, because the film still could have been salvaged by a proper character arc for...
9.
Max wasn't as poorly-written as many of the characters above. He wasn't as poorly-acted as many of the characters above. But his inadequacies were, for me, the final nail in the coffin for this movie. If his character had had a purposeful, well-constructed narrative arc, I could have forgiven many of my other complaints. But he didn't.
His backstory is told with flashbacks to his childhood, presented with a sepia-tinted echo chamber effect that is supposed to invoke nostalgia for idealism or something (it's hammy). He tells his childhood friend Frey that he wants to go to Elysium. He is told by a nun that he is special and that everyone has a purpose (it's hammy).
That's it. That's all his characterization. He never stops wanting to go to Elysium. He never changes how he thinks about Elysium. Elysium is his goal, forever. The only thing that happens is that he is given more and more reasons to want to go to Elysium. He wants to go because he wants to go + now he is terminally ill + now his crush's daughter is terminally ill + now he decides, tangentially, that everyone else who is terminally ill should be healed.
He didn't grow or change as a character. You could argue that he eventually understands why "the hippo wants a friend", but it's not like that was something he had any reason to dispute in the first place. Blomkamp likely wanted to funnel his desperation into a political agenda, but Max ends up coming off as selfish, or at least narrow-minded, only tangentially interested in saving others because it furthers his own goals. Again, you may argue (triple spoiler alert) that that's incorrect because he sacrifices himself at the end to make everyone a citizen. Sure, but he was about to die anyway, and I still think he did that more for Matilda than the population of earth.
That's all beside the point. I found Max to be sort of a lummox. He isn't too bright, and he just gets herded around from a character with an agenda to another character with an agenda, and when that agenda conflicts with his Elysium goal, he engages them in a fist-gun-knife fight. He has no strategy, no scruples. He isn't even a very good fighter, despite his mech suit! The two times he kills Kruger are both accidental (he drops a grenade the first time, and Kruger pulls a grenade on himself the second time). He's kind of inept. As the above Sam Strange article aptly puts it, "he spends most of the film on his back".
It's especially disappointing because for about twenty minutes, Max has the beginnings of a real character. We learn that he has fallen from grace, that he has criminal tendencies he is struggling not to sink back into. We learn that he still carries a torch for his long-lost friend Frey. We see him give lip to robots against his better judgment. These are entertaining scenes. But after those first twenty minutes, these characteristics all fade into the ether. He flattens out. Things just happen to him. He's a tech suit-clad pinball, bouncing between obstacles, a tech suit that feels arbitrary when we learn that he is chosen to wear it because nobody else feels like it. He stops struggling with character, resorts to displaying two alternating emotions: determination and confusion.
Squandered potential.
#
In this New Yorker article comparing the various portrayals of the Incredible Hulk in film, Film Critic Hulk makes an excellent argument about what he calls "assumed empathy".
HULK WRITES ABOUT IT ALL THE TIME, BUT ONE OF THE ONGOING PROBLEMS OF BLOCKBUSTER CINEMA THESE DAYS IS ASSUMED EMPATHY. IT’S AS IF OUR STORYTELLERS JUST PLOP A FILM IN OUR LAPS AND SAY, “HERE’S OUR MAIN CHARACTER AND WE’RE GOING TO ASSUME THAT YOU’RE INTERESTED IN THEM FOR THAT REASON ALONE. THEY’RE THE MAIN CHARACTER!” … YOU WANT REAL EMPATHY? LOOK AT THE PANTHEON OF GREAT HEROES. BEOWULF. ROBIN HOOD. SHERLOCK HOLMES. INDIANA JONES. EVEN OLD BUCKET-HEAD HIMSELF, TONY STARK. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THESE ICONS THAT MAKES THEM SO MUCH MORE THAN “HEROES.” THEY’RE ENGAGING. THEY’RE LIVELY. THEY’RE FLAWED. THEY’RE INTERESTING. AND FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS DISCUSSION, THEY ARE TESTAMENTS TO THE FACT THAT EMPATHY CAN NEVER BE ASSUMED.
I spent an excruciating amount of time digging into the central nine characters of Elysium in an attempt to show that the film gives us nothing to care about. We are expected to empathize with our protagonist because he is our protagonist, and because he is Matt Damon. We are expected to empathize with the side characters because of their relation to our protagonist. And we are expected to revile our antagonists because of their social position. It's lazy. It's irresponsible. It doesn't work.
This may be unsubstantiated, but I'm willing to bet that unlike bad acting, or bad set design, or poor pacing, or sloppy editing, or uninspired cinematography, or an oversimple plot, or unsatisfying themes... flat characters are the one thing that a movie cannot recover from. Characters are a story's avenue for drama, and without drama a film is nothing.
So why do people defend Elysium? Why do they say they enjoyed it? I'm guessing that the scant bits of characterization offered in the first twenty minutes--like Max mouthing off to the robots, or Frey almost turning Max down when he asks if they can get a cup of coffee--were enough for them to give the movie a pass, and they coasted on them for the rest of the film because they enjoyed the special effects so much, and they enjoyed Matt Damon enough, and they enjoyed that this was a sci-fi film that was "about something".
Is that all we want from movies, though? Just enough characterization and drama to get by? Enough to let us watch the breathtaking special effects without us feeling like we're watching a demo reel?
I hope I don't sound like I'm picking nits. I wrote all of this because I think Elysium's failures are important to learn from, and because I think it could have been so much better. The blockbuster can aspire to a better class of storytelling. Sci-fi can aspire to a better class of storytelling. Hell, District 9 did aspire to a better class of storytelling.
1 / 5 BLOBS
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