Well, the first thing to say about Elysium is that it's pretty good. The second thing is that it's only pretty good up to a point - literally, a point in the narrative, around twenty minutes before the end - at which point I could find myself beginning to shift in my seat, getting bored. I'd been sold on the film before that, and it only took three seconds from me to get to one state to the other.
This isn't a review of the film, by the way, so here be spoilers. I'm usually pretty dead set against any kind of spoiler whatsoever, having had many good plot reveals destroyed for me by clunky written reviews. I will have a rant about at it here at some point, but now's not the time, particularly as the main discussion point will involve a significant spoiler. I hope I've indicated that enough by now that many people who haven't seen the film yet will have turned away. Either because they don't want the film's end given away, or because of my shoddy writing style.
Anyway, as I say, the film is pretty good. There are a significant number of plot points that make no sense whatsoever if you look at them too closely, but, like good cinema does when it's doing its job properly, there's enough smoke and mirrors so that you don't concern yourself with mere problems like logic until after you've left the cinema. At one point in the story, this is acheived literally with smoke and mirrors. It's got a great visual style (and as such, has a good deal in common with Neill Blomkamp's other film District 9, and like that film is more potent sci-fi than we've been served in recent years, in that it has something to say about the world we live in.) The Big Bads of the film are - literally - Homeland Security, and for the most part, your life in this world is safe and secure if you're both rich and white. Most of the people living in the gleaming space station above Earth are white, except for those occasions when - in a cute gag - they choose to 'go Asian' because it's fashionable. While the great and not so good get to live and upgrade themselves continuously in a coporate funded shiny afterlife - iHeaven, if you like - everybody else is punished (and dying) for the crime of being poor.
Matt Damon gives good value in what's a fairly unremarkable role (apart from anything else, he can do Awkward Flirting as well as anyone). The most interesting role by far is that played by Jodie Foster. She's Jessica Delacourt, the Secretary Of Defence, delivered as a Fox News dream of how to protect your assests. She's sneery, absolutely cold-eyed and rational, and remarkably confident in her agenda to keep Elysium free of immigrants. At one point, she manages to deliver a variation on the 'won't somebody think of the children' line that quells her more liberal detractors. She stalks and smirks her way through all of her scenes with the attiude of someone who thinks that all other people are idiots. Somebody paid her a job because they didn't want to get their own hands dirty, and she doesn't have much patience when her bosses start getting queasy at her approach - she's absolutely disinterested in preserving life if the people involved aren't passport-carrying citizens.
Foster's character is a great foil for Damon's. She's intelligent, focused and ambitious, clear-eyed on what the end game is. Damon's Max De Costa, on the other hand, doesn't know what the hell he's doing. He's basically a good guy who knows far too many bad guys, and very likely can't even spell his own name. As befits a movie like this, he's more able to have a conversation with his fists. The two characters have an entirely different approach, which makes any meeting between them compelling. She's the main bad guy, he's the main good guy, and when they meet face to face, there's nothing for them to get a grip on, no traction. And then, indeed - here's the spoiler - they don't meet - ever - in the film, because she's killed twenty minutes from the end. She has been the catalyst for Max DeCosta's misfortunes throughout the film, and it's unclear that he is ever aware of her existence.
There is another bad guy - played by Shartlo Copley - who works for Foster's character, and ultimately is the one that kills her. There's absolutely nothing wrong with his character, and in fact it's a great wise-cracking, creepy and slimy villain. But here's the thing, though. We've had plenty of wise-cracking, creepy and slimy villains in films like this. There's been no population control on those characters. But as soon as Copley kills her off, and straps on a exo-suit to do battle with Matt Damon, your mind disengages a notch or two, because we've seen that finale. At least thirty times. Three of them in Transformers films. It's not new, it's not surprising. As soon as Jodie's been dispatched, we know that we're back to a Boys Scrapping With Each Other movie. And so it proves. It's a shame, because the wildly differing politics of the two characters promised a much more interesting end to the film.
I understand, of course, that Elysium is a popcorn, tentpole kind of film, and for it to go from guns and explosions to a Mr Smith Goes To Washington style debate would have been testing for the audience - particularly as , realistically, the more intelligent Delacourt would have won any argument against De Costa. But I am suggesting that when you have such an interesting dynamic, perhaps it doesn't always have to end in fisticuffs. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Jodie is killed off because she can't have a fight at the end - in other words, because her character is female, and a non-superpowered one at that. In fact, everything about the role and the film suggests that the character might have originally written male, and that Jodie Foster simply lobbied for and 'gender-flipped' the role (apparently Foster does that kind of thing a lot), meaning that the character was due to be dispatched in the same way even if it was male.
Delacourt is a more compelling character because she's female (and, admittedly, played by Foster, which helps) in spite of the fact - indeed, because of the fact that nobody makes any concession or any reference whatsoever - to her gender. It just would have been nice, once Jodie Foster had been cast, and started doing such fascinating things with the character (her fixed rictus grin and careful accent is something that less known actresses wouldn't have been allowed to get away with) that they couldn't have made some changes to the script and let her play with the boys til the end.
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