Elysium: a worthy, smart blockbuster for SF fans

To be absolutely honest, at the expense of seeming to criticize a film I mean to praise, I didn't get that emotionally involved in Elysium: its characters are too one-dimensional, too straightforward, too like thematic elements in a parable about inequality and class warfare to really invite investment or identification, and the experience of seeing the film is more like watching the working through of ideas than the telling of a story... All the same, God bless it for HAVING ideas, for having something to say; and God bless Neill Blomkamp for proving that his singular vision, so successfully captured by District 9, is not the stuff of an anomalous indy one-off, but can endure the travails of big budget filmmaking, can more-or-less survive the journey to the megaplex undiluted. It's not that easy to do! I've seen a few summer blockbusters this year - Pacific Rim, World War Z - and while I enjoyed them enough as they passed before my eyes, I felt strikingly hollow afterwards, and somewhat ashamed to have actually spent money on fundamentally empty experiences - like I'd been suckered; Pacific Rim was singularly disappointing insofar as so little of Del Toro's personality, so rich in his other films, seemed to have made it onto the screen. It coulda almost been a Michael Bay movie; Elysium could only have been made by Neill Blomkamp. The design of the spaceships and technology, the way the slums of Earth are filmed, the ways in which the hero has to undergo a painful personal transformation (this time more into cyborg than prawn-thing) in order to achieve redemption all resonated against his earlier film and spoke of a personal vision at work, rather than a corporate boardroom, a gigantic budget, and an astonishingly huge special effects team... though no doubt all of those were in play behind this film, as well...

Truth is, the bigger and louder movies get, somehow the more disposable and of-the-moment they seem, such that it becomes hard to imagine anyone caring about them in years to come; since there is less and less room for individual idiosyncrasy, thematic richness, or authentic personal passion behind them, how can they hope to linger in the memory (or the marketplace)? Now that people have all but given up on DVDs and Blu-Rays, with less and less money to be made from repeat viewings of a film after its theatrical run has finished, maybe staying power is no longer a priority? One suspects that in twenty years time the blockbusters of the moment will be as forgotten as films like Sly Stallone's Cliffhanger are today...

For its idiosyncracy, Elysium is a rare enough experience - at least in the megaplex - that I'm willing to overlook the film's flaws. And it's nice to know that there's a film in the theatres that actually invites discussion, analysis, that has things on its mind other than getting as much money as it can out of as many viewers as possible, before the corporate entities behind it move on to the next spectacle. Elysium isn't perfect, but it gives you hope that mainstream cinema isn't entirely worth abandoning just yet. I bet it'll have a nice following in third world countries, too...