Elysium

'Elysium' is South African born, Vancouver based director, Neill Blomkamp's follow up to his amazing debut feature film, 'District 9'. And just like with 'District 9' Blomkamp is proving yet again that sci-fi movies can have a social and political message without bashing you over the head with it.

It's better up there. That's the tagline for this movie, and 'up there' is Elysium; a beautiful, man-made space station floating in orbit around an Earth that is overpopulated and over polluted. Up there is where the wealthiest live, and while the film doesn't give much of a view of how they live, I would hazard a guess that they have it pretty easy. The rest of the population, stuck on Earth, has it far worse. Slums have taken over and people are struggling to survive.  Especially Max, (Matt Damon) a reformed car thief doing his best to make it day by day, with big dreams of making it to Elysium some day. After a factory accident that gives him five days to live, Max becomes the perfect person to attempt to finally get past the harsh anti-immigration cannons of Elysium. Once there he can use one of the CT scan type things that identify and remove disease from citizens of Elysium. Max is outfitted with a kind of awesome, but mostly horrifying cyborg-type rig he goes head-to-head in a race against time opposite Kruger(Sharlto Copley), Elysium's Secretary of Defense Delacourt's (Jodie Foster) favourite mercenary, who makes a habit out of shooting refugees out of the sky.

While I'll be the first to admit the class struggle allegory in this film isn't quite as strong as the allegory of racial allegory in 'District 9', it doesn't make it any less enjoyable. I love that Blomkamp is making sci-fi smart again, not just the bubblegum 'movie-of-the-summer' sci-fi flicks that many studios have put out in the last decade. On top of the politics, Blomkamp also has an amazing eye for special effects. Often special effects these days are so smooth and CGI-looking that they take you right out of the story. The effects we get in 'Elysium' are gritty and corporeal, when a shuttle crashes it doesn't just blow up into a perfect orange fireball, it's machinery wrenched apart, like it should be.

I also love that this movie is only 109 minutes long. Blomkamp recognises that his audience is relatively intelligent and doesn't need to bash them over the head with detailed minutiae that they can infer for themselves. He, instead, pushes forward with the things the audience cares about and wants to see. In an age when movies are insufferably long for no good reason (coughTheLoneRangercough) Elysium tells its story in the perfect running time. When movies like this are made it makes me excited for what could come next, from Blomkamp and from sci-fi in general.