Movie review: Eat the rich, hack the future in 'Elysium'

Max Da Costa (Matt Damon), orphan and Earthling, was once a legendary car thief. Now he’s just one of the many poor ex-cons trying to go straight and eke out a minimum wage life.

So far, he’s been having a horrid time of it, working at the assembly line of Armadyne Corp, a robotics factory. There aren’t a lot of plum jobs for ex-cons in the sci-fi future of Los Angeles in 2154.

Outre socio-political sci-fi puts me on my guard. All too often, it tends to propagandize rather than tell a good story. That it’s trying to slip an agenda by me makes me suspicious, but director Neil Blomkamp’s “District 9” pulled off the trick of crafting a sci-fi gem about race and prejudice by putting aliens into the blender and setting the thing in South Africa. So I went into this Matt Damon starrer with an open mind, hoping for just some fair to average entertainment.

Surprisingly, “Elysium” delivers the kind of futuristic drama with existential overtones that will definitely catapult it into cult status. Sure it sprawls and meanders into narrative speed bumps and you can likely shelve this one under “sci-fi poverty porn” (it’d fit the bill and overflow it) but this sometimes rambling, sometimes doctrinaire homage to Dick and Heinlein does work. I mean, really. The reason for that is mostly because the social caveats in here are very well executed and un-preachy.

Two things you need to know about the premise of this movie:

One: In 2154, the very wealthy live on a luxurious space station (a Stanford torus, for you OC geeks) called Elysium. Up there, the citizens live in comfort and safety with robotic servants at their beck and call. Being an Elysian also means freedom from disease since their tech has advanced to the point that their “Med-Bays” can cure anything from colic to cancer.

Two: Max and everybody else (i.e the poor) live on an overpopulated, scorched Earth. Oh, and the planet is patrolled and policed by androids under the control of the Elysians. Poverty: even in the future, it sucks.

It’s a total downward spiral for Max when a factory floor accident exposes him to a lethal dose of radiation, netting him a whopping five days to live. Armadyne Corp’s big boss John Carlyle (William Fichtner) fires him and sends him home with his separation pay: a bottle of painkillers.

Desperate to live, Max turns to his old shady contacts, to an underground operation led by Spider (Wagner Moura), who cuts him a deal, if he can help them hack into an Elysian’s head and get the access codes. How Max gets from being a dying man to being the world’s savior is complicated but assuredly entertaining.

I loved the gritty visuals here, and Earth as a dump so ridden with disease, crime, and poverty that it actually looks like a cross between Payatas (except with more concrete and steel hovels) and the 200-floor structures of AD 40,000’s Mega-Cities (see “Judge Dredd”) is something I can buy.    

The poor Earthlings in LA speak mostly a patois of Spanish and English, while the rich Elysians putter about their pools sipping champagne and conversing in French. Later on, we find out that coyotes (read: transporters of illegal immigrants) are still doing their thing, except in space.  When you’re building de-familiarized worlds, the clichés are useful. I get that.  

What ties this thing together is the approach of making this tale of dystopia about the people, which really hinges on the stellar acting of Matt Damon, Jodie Foster (as Elysium’s ruthless Secretary of Defense Jessica Delacourt), and Sharlto Copley (as the brutal Agent C.M. Kruger). They make up the strange trinity of this narrative.  

But Damon takes the prize by bringing angst and that crucial piece of everyman believability to Max as we share his pain and POV. Exactly how he morphs from a mere factory floor monkey and into the  person trying to burn down the rich people is as engrossing as it is hard to watch. At the least, he’s a strange anti-hero and an unlikely proponent of the “Down with Elysium!” movement.  

The rapper Marshall Mathers was offered the role for this, but he wanted the movie to be shot in Detroit. Can you imagine Eminem in this leading man role of a put-upon ex-criminal turned reluctant weapon and revolutionary?

Just like “District 9,” “Elysium” runs on a motor powered by transhumanism. In the former, it was about understanding xeno culture by literally mutating into the alien; this time, it’s about machine augmentation of the human form. Max is outfitted with an exosekeleton to become the baddest thing on the planet: a Droid. How daily life works out in this scenario of robots as authority is well thought out and what makes intelligent sci-fi.

One of the best scenes is when Max is standing in line for the bus and the local Droid police patrol swagger by (yes, them bots had swagger and brag) and harass citizens with prior criminal records. Max makes a joke, the Droids don’t get it—they think he’s giving them attitude and they break his arm to drive home a point. Sounds familiar, hey?

Another fave of mine is when Max meets up with his parole officer: half a robotic torso and a head garishly painted to look like a police officer in blue uniform. This machine detects your heart rate and dispenses extra jail time and chill pills for relaxation in equal measure with all the good humor of an oven toaster.

Running parallel to Max’s attempt to hack and fly into Elysium is the plight of Defense Secretary Delacourt (she who orders illegal shuttles shot out of orbit) against all these inter-planetary border jumpers. Because of her vicious tactics, Elysian politics is taking a pacifist turn and she aims to curb this with a praxis seizure: to install herself as the new President of the habitat.

Agent Kruger is the X-factor and real villain in the narrative polar opposites of Delacourt and Max. He’s the monkeywrench in the plans of both sides because, despite nominally working for the Elysians, he’s just as disgruntled and oppressed under the yoke of the space bourgeoisie and has his own agenda.

Sharlto Copley was great as a government pencil pusher in “District 9” and he plays a hateful, cruel, katana-wielding SOB here to the nines. His brusque ways and zero moral compass represents a new low in future humanity.

When the agendas and stories of the three finally collide, the results are explosive and revolutionary. Bravo for tying up all the loose ends in two climactic scenes that will make sci-fi geeks of many stripes writhe in ecstatic, fiery denoument.

Even the scene where illegal migrants land on one of the posh Elysian lawns and are rounded, trussed up, and deported back just like any Mexican border jumper hits too close to today’s immigration headlines. Except that its robots who round up the humans.      

Don’t go into this one expecting wham-bang spaceships and ray guns fluff, though there's plenty of that and the IMAX version will assault your eyes. “Elyisum” will make you root for the underdogs with unrelenting action, even if its big concepts and heady class commentary may turn off some and make others run to look up their “Communist Manifesto” for a refresher.       

One day it will no doubt make the “Best of” lists that routinely include dystopian movies like “Dark City,” “Total Recall,” and “Blade Runner.” I’m betting on it.      

“Elyisum” is now showing in theaters nationwide. — VC, GMA News