Director Blomkamp Does It Again With Gripping "Elysium"

By Luis Monteagudo Jr.

When “District 9” premiered in 2009, it heralded the film debut of an exciting, visionary South African filmmaker by the name of Neill Blomkamp.

“District 9” was a stunning, fresh take on sci-fi, mixing the action and what-if possibilities of the genre with a gritty, realistic story that was seen as an allegory for the problems facing society.

It’s 2013 and Blomkamp is back, this time with “Elysium,” a movie that echoes “District 9,” yet stands on its own a gripping, bold and invigorating film.

This time, it’s not the shanty towns of South Africa, but Los Angeles in the year 2154, a poverty-stricken, polluted ghetto where Spanish has become the primary language and citizens are oppressed by a pervasive government and its automated law enforcers.

Enter Max, a legendary auto thief and hoodlum played by Matt Damon who goes to work each morning at a robot factory and lives in a small shack in one of the shanty towns of L.A.

For Damon and others stuck on Earth, daily life is a struggle. Their dreams are to escape the planet and get to Elysium, a floating, giant space station where the air is clean, life is easy and illness and disease can be wiped out by lying on a high-tech medical bed that fixes any malady you might have.

Elysium becomes Max’s only hope for salvation when he gets a lethal dose of radiation at the factory. But getting there is no easy mission, thanks to Jodie Foster’s snarling, ruthless Delacourt, the Secretary of Defense for Elysium’s government.  She doesn’t hesitate to issue shoot-to-kill orders against any rogue ship that tries to get to Elysium and uses a rabid, heavily armed mercenary named Kruger back on Earth to keep refugees from getting off the dying planet.

Director Blomkamp doesn’t try to hide his message – the downtrodden Earth refugees who make it to Elysium are considered undocumented citizens who are breaking the law when they land on Elysium and are hunted down by Foster’s emotionless security force.

The movie roars at a fast pace, and the action is intense, with shootouts punctuated by bullets that burst in mid-air, and exotic weapons.

Damon strikes the right note as a weary cog in the modern industrial machine who finally reaches his breaking point, and discovers his humanity along the way. Foster nails her villain part, dripping with disdain for those who stand in her way.

But it’s Sharlto Copley who steals the movie. Copley played the put-upon, by-the-book bureaucrat in “District 9” and goes as far away as possible from that role with “Elysium’s” Kruger, a samurai-sword wielding, guns-blazing, remorseless assassin. It’s a stunning transformation and it vaults Kruger into the top ranks of cinema’s truly bad-asses.

With “Elysium,” Blomkamp has proven he’s no one-hit wonder. This is an exciting, risk-taking filmmaking and it’s exciting to think what he will show us in the future.