ELYSIUM (2013): A literal gap between rich and poor

If Elysium's heavyhanded allegory won't be the ringing bell that sets off the move toward a fairer health care system in America, it's no real fault of the film itself.  Like Neill Blomkamp's debut film, District 9, the connection to the current class system is too obvious and its thesis clear too soon to be truly effective as a political comment.  But also like that previous film, it's alive, exciting, intelligent, funny, bitterly sad, and it creates a vivid, intricately realized setting.

Elysium is actually better than District 9, which had a brilliant premise and dazzling visual effects but failed to follow through with its story.  It's a superior sci-fi action film that deserves mention alongside the best.

In the near future, the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen as technology has advanced.  The rich have abandoned Earth and taken residence on Elysium, a space station orbiting not far away.  What's more, medical technology has advanced to the point where cancer can be cured with the flick of a switch, but only the rich on Elysium have access to it.  Earth, in the meantime, is overcrowded and dilapidated, and its inhabitants are still loading into emergency rooms.

When Max (Matt Damon), a lowly factory worker and ex-con, needs medical treatment badly, he calls in a favor from an underground illegal immigrant runner (Wagner Moura) to get a ticket to Elysium.  The scheme involves a heist of important data stored inside the brain of a CEO (William Fichtner, sublimely snakelike).  But his plans to cure himself may be sidetracked by his reconnection with a childhood friend (Alice Braga) and her young daughter, who has leukemia.

The role of Max doesn't particularly play well to Damon's strengths, since he's a better and subtler leading man than is required for a Mad Max/RoboCop-style martyr hero (he was similarly a little bit too good for the Bourne series).  But he knocks it out of the park anyway, lending a working-class sense of humor and a broken man's gravity to the role.  Moura is also likable as the hustler of illegals to Elysium with questionable motives.

Jodie Foster plays the sinister, power-grabbing Elysian Secretary of Defense Delacourt, modeled on the likes of Dick Cheney, in a scenery-gnashing performance that would be terrible if it were meant to be good in the first place.  The role, much like Famke Janssen's wild villainess on "Hemlock Grove," is not meant to be played well; it's meant to be played viciously and snarlingly, which Foster ably does.

The film is spirited away, however, by Sharlto Copley as Kruger, a secret officer of Elysium who's used by Delcaourt to sabotage illegal transport to the space station.  Copley, who kickstarted his career as the hero in District 9, here plays a villain so memorably ruthless and horrible, but at the same time scarily and delightfully believable as a character.  I wouldn't count him out for an Oscar.

Elysium rarely takes a breath as Max's quest follows irrefutable logic to a simultaneously victorious and unfortunate conclusion.  The movie has some holes in the plot: the McGuffin of the information stored in Fichtner's head is a little too simplistic, as is the egalitarian victory at the end which feels too easy.  But it doesn't derail a film that is a monumental and inventive piece of entertainment.

*** 1/2 out of ****