The 99% Solution

To judge by the movies, 2154 will be a crucial year for U.S. space discovery–it’s when Avatar is set–but a lousy time to be stuck on Planet Earth. In the 2154 of Elysium, writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s first film since his beyond-cool sci-fi parable District 9, the wealthy have fled to a luxurious satellite–the Elysium of the title–to pursue lives of chic indolence, and Los Angeles has become an ugly crime lab for Latino thugs and a few lowlife Anglos. One of the latter, Max (Matt Damon), gets a radiation overdose that can be cured only on Elysium. To reach the satellite, he agrees to a data-heist scheme that could get him killed by sundown.

A piquant blend of two clashing political scenarios–the Occupy Wall Street notion of the 1% enslaving the 99% and the Tea Party nightmare of illegals turning American cities into Rio-style slums–the movie spends its ingenuity on contrasting its two landscapes. Elysium: an enclave of Newport, R.I., mansions and sterile office warrens. L.A.: a filthy barrio, the walls scarred with graffiti and most male bodies fetishized with tattoos. The color is desaturated to the point of exhaustion, in the one big summer action movie either too poor or too proud to use 3-D.

The context and subtext are plenty imposing here. What’s missing is the text–an engaging plot. Blomkamp stitches together patches from a slew of other sci-fi films: the rich-poor future world of Gattaca, In Time and Upside Down (and, if you will, WALL•E); the mind-melding caper from Inception. While Jodie Foster, as Elysium’s Donald Rumsfeld, spits out her nefarious plans in an accent that roams wildly across the English-speaking world in the space of a sentence, Damon’s Max bonds with his childhood friend Frey (gorgeous Alice Braga, who has played this same role, the Angel of Dystopia, in City of God, I Am Legend and Blindness). Guess what? Max has five days to live, and Frey’s daughter Matilda (Emma Tremblay) is dying of leukemia. Puh-leeze! Can’t a movie stir tension without endangering a child’s life?

In District 9, Blomkamp managed to fuse social satire (of apartheid in his native South Africa) with a wry narrative take on interspecies friendship. Plus some great icky-creature CGI. In Elysium, all the monsters are human, the rooting interest is rootless and the political view is about as subtle as Max’s tattoos. In the 2154 visionary sweepstakes, we’re sticking with James Cameron