Elysium

Neill Blomkamp first received buzz as the protege of Peter Jackson when he was set to direct a film adaptation of Halo. When that project was scrapped, Jackson and Blomkamp settled on District 9, a science fiction film acting as an allegory to Apartheid mixed with the personal narrative of David Cronenberg’s The Fly.  

The film was an instant hit critics and audiences alike, even snagging a few Oscar nominations, including best picture. However District 9 was never able to elevate itself into elite sci-fi territory, as the social commentary quickly devolves into a pure action film halfway through. With the summer release of Elysium, expectations were high for him to correct his previous stumble.  

Sadly, he did not.

Elysium depicts a bleak and barren future where the people of Earth are riddled with poverty, overpopulation, and disease. The truly privileged and wealthy live in the orbiting Utopia dubbed Elysium, where each citizen is provided med-bays which keeps them 100% disease free. Ex-thief turned factory worker Max Da Costa (Matt Damon, We Bought a Zoo, Promised Land) gets exposed to deadly amounts of radiation and is left no choice but to invade Elysium, where entrance by Earth citizens is illegal, to procure treatment. With the threat of a stealth mission imminent, Secretary of Defense Jessica Delcourt (Jodie Foster The Silence of the Lambs, Carnage) deploys the psychotic mercenary Agent Kruger (Sharlto Copley, District 9, The A-Team) to detain the invaders.

Blomkamp certainly shows an eagerness in tackling relevant and pressing social issues. In District 9, he handled xenophobia, disease, and corporatism while in Elysium he targets classism, healthcare, and immigration. While drawing topical parallels is the cornerstone of good science fiction, Blomkamp fails to develop any of these themes in Elysium. In addition to faltering into problematic tropes like the white savior, none of the issues he attempts to address are given their proper care and attention. His arcs are either neatly tied up in a bow or riddled with plot holes that give his commentary a lot more flash than sizzle.

His actors and characters are merely placeholders, since none of them have any real defining characteristics or realization. The only exception is Copley, who delivers a performance rife with instability and menace, but even his character is so thinly written it is really all for naught.  

Both the commentary and character development fall to the wayside because Blomkamp is proving more and more that he is an action director posing as a sci-fi one. If he were to put half the energy he puts into his action set pieces into writing more inspired material that manages to deliver on the social commentary, his next work could be a science fiction landmark.

There’s no doubt that Blomkamp has filmmaking talent and an eye for interesting aesthetics. He is able to construct realistically gritty landscapes and recognizes the growing marriage between man and machine, and that it’s union can be bruising and gruesome. This sort of visual hasn’t been explored this well since the aforementioned king of body horror David Cronenberg.

However, he is also starting to resemble another prolific science fiction icon: James Cameron. Both have immaculate control over dazzling visuals, but both lack the skill and ability to deliver an elite screenplay. Until he matures as a writer or leaves the writing to someone else, he’ll be stuck in the realm of fluffy action films and far from science fiction paradise.