"Elysium" R
Neill Blomkamp, (District 9) directs Matt Damon in the 24 movie, no actually Elysium, the trippy scifi action flick that tells of a world ruined by corporate and political stupidity. This forces the poor class to remain on Earth while the rich can live in orbit on a glittering O'Neill colony Taurus and not ever get sick or die.
Immediately the visuals strike you, as the director is a FX guy at heart and likes stunning images. The ads and movie posters show the exo suit wearing antihero, Max, posing like in the old scifi novels in the tradition of Man Plus and modern video games like Halo and Eve. (Blomkamp was originally going to do a Halo movie).
Maybe the station personnel never get sick because they had to overcome the space radiation that surely would have cooked them inside what appeared to be an unprotected atmosphere field clinging to the inside of the Taurus.
Also the thing changes size and perspective. The opening shot makes it appear as though the station is as big in diameter as the Earth next to it, but other shots show it as big as the moon, to as small as six miles in diameter. If they are generating gravity through centripetal force, it would have to be nearly the diameter of a small moon in oder to be even half an Earth g. Nobody on the station would be able to walk on Earth. That's why they would need exo suits. Genius.
Max's ex girlfriend, Frey, Alice Braga, is a nurse at a local hospital on the mean streets of a gritty, dirty ruined Los Angeles, where she also treats her daughter who has leukemia.
Max works for this evil boss, action star William Finchner as Carlyle, making robot parts and drones. (The drones are actually directly referenced in this, like in the Tom Cruise one, but not like in Star Trek, where they are torpedoes).
Jodie Foster plays the evil station manager, Delacort, who constantly schemes to usurp the power of the station from Faran Tahir, (of Star Trek 2009), President Patel. She even shoots down immigrant ships using a henchman with assorted military weapons.
Delacort is apparently insane and keeps talking with a strange mixture of French, English, highland New Yorker and something else, but it is not consistent and a little distracting. She should have just went for New England upper crust speech. That would have worked better. Eventually she just goes for that anyway.
After she shoots down the immigrant shuttles, she gets in a scheme with the evil boss,who just happens to be the guy that built the station, or at least hjis company did, and he's bragging he did it himself. It's hard to tell if he also is just a super megalomaniac and it just taking credit, and incredible if he actually was the one who built it, as there would havde been tens of thousands of workers building that thing over centuries.
The story only takes place in 2154, so unless they get started tomorrow, they will never finish it by 2154.
Max gets injured when his evil foreman tells him to crawl into a radiation zone where the robots are processed. It is not clear why the robot machine doesn't have a safety device that would immediately shut down the radiation injector thing, and it's not clear why they would have such a dangerous little crawl space on the factory floor. OSHA no longer exists in the future.
He is then sent home to die in a few days, where he comes across two friends, including a whacked out computer hacker who wants to steal the boss man's secrets from right out of his head jack. In the future they all have them. He gets the opportunity when the crazy car jacking buddies that work for him offer to put him in the exo suit so he can play like the guy in Man Plus and Man Plus 2, (an old book series), and maybe like the guy in Gattica a little. Now if only they gave that thing wings! Nope.
Presumably this one mega corporation has bought out the entire world and built the station using all of the metals and materials from Earth, so then the evil boss literally is in charge of the mess. How draconian and dystopian. It's Disctrict 9 without aliens but with a space station. Maybe it's in the same alternate universe as D9 and the station was started in the 1960s. They never said it but then it might explain how it got built so big, so fast.
Eventually Max is involved in accidentally killing the evil boss, and is being chased by the tracker and his evil allies, and Frey and her daughter are taken, and all of them meet up on a ship headed for the station, and a destiny that might change the status quo for the station and Earth.
Review by Adam Browne
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