Matt Damon serves as a solid anchor to the sci-fi action film Elysium.
Joseph Stalin once said — or perhaps, Stalin is merely rumored to have once said — that while the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men is a statistic. Stalin didn’t get many things right, but in this statement, he reveals a keener understanding of the workings of drama than most contemporary Hollywood screenwriters.
Increasingly, Hollywood movies don’t function as drama so much as adolescent wish-fulfillment. If there’s one problem this summer’s action blockbusters share, it’s that their protagonists are never in any real peril. Take a look at the top-grossing action movies of the year — Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Fast & Furious 6 and Star Trek Into Darkness — and two trends become clear.
First off, the hero of each film is either a superhero or might as well be — Dominic Toretto’s gang of street racers from Fast & Furious are so superhuman and invulnerable that they might as well be the gearhead Avengers; Captain Kirk, as the hero of a space opera (a close cousin of the superhero film) has twice the wealth and technology available to him as Batman does. These are people who shrug off bullets and explosions the way you or I might brush off dandruff — so how can we sympathize with their plight?
Second, each of these films is part of a franchise. There are major financial incentives to keep churning out sequels, and that means not only can the heroes never be killed off, they can never be morally compromised either. You know Superman isn’t going to die, and you know he’s always going to be the good guy. If your hero can’t be harmed, and he can’t be tempted, (and, unfortunately, he must always be a he, never a she, although that’s a complaint for another essay entirely) what possible conflict can there be?
The answer: not much. Our most highly paid storytellers have forgotten the simple truth that even a madman such as Stalin could grasp: All stories, at their most basic level, are about individuals in peril, suffering the consequences of their choices. And, to compensate for this staggeringly obvious failure, they only offer us explosions.
To be sure, the characters in Star Trek, Iron Man, et al., make choices. The issue is that none of these choices have consequences, at least for any of the main characters.
To wit: In Man of Steel, Superman is torn between two very different father figures — one who urges him to assimilate into human society and hide his powers and another who wishes he would get on with the super-powered badassery already. Unsurprisingly, Clark Kent goes with the latter option. This should be the film’s key dramatic moment, one with dire repercussions — the hero has chosen his duty, but the film has spent nearly an hour warning us that there will be consequences to that choice. Humanity will reject him. He, and the people he loves, will suffer. Something. Anything.
Except that’s not what happens. There are consequences: The villain attacks and destroys half of New York. But this doesn’t affect Superman, Lois Lane or Ma Kent. Nothing is at stake for the individuals at the center of the story; only the civilians, the statistical millions, who get caught in the crossfire suffer — and they don’t even get the dignity of an on-screen death. Though dozens of skyscrapers collapse in the epic CGI fracas, there’s hardly one body. As far as the audience can tell, the only consequence of Superman’s choice is awesomeness.
It wasn’t always this way. Die Hard, the standard-bearer for perfectly executed meat-and-potatoes American action cinema, is, at its heart, a story about a guy trying to reconcile with his wife. There are explosions and gunplay and catchphrases, of course, but there’s also a clear story arc about the decisions made by an individual and how they affect the people around him. That used to be par for the course with action movies, but somewhere along the way, Hollywood got lost in a quagmire of CGI and franchising and has been churning out $100 million cookie-cutter movies about cartoons saving the world from other cartoons ever since.
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Enter Elysium, the second film from South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp (District 9). It is an original idea — not a sequel, not a spin-off, not a comic-book adaptation. It adheres to the basic formula: story = action + effect. It is only sort of OK, the kind of thing that would pass as adequate without really standing out in any other year. But this isn’t any other year. It’s 2013. So Elysium feels like a godsend.
The story is about a guy named Max (Matt Damon, Behind the Candelabra). He’s not particularly heroic. He has a checkered past and the prison tattoos to prove it. He has a bum job that he can’t afford to lose. He lives in a Los Angeles slum that looks like the worst the Third World has to offer — but, hell, all of Earth looks like the Third World in 2154. Sometimes he looks up and sees Elysium, the idyllic orbital station reserved for the super-rich, hanging in the twilight, and wonders what it would be like to live in a place without crime, disease, pollution or death.
One day, his boss orders him to break safety protocols and check on a piece of faulty equipment in a restricted part of the factory floor. He doesn’t want to. He knows it’s dangerous, but he also knows he’s expendable and powerless, and the only other vocation for him is petty theft. So he agrees. Predictably, it goes awry, and he ends up with a fatal dose of radiation.
He decides he’s going to break into Elysium, where anything can be cured, to save himself. And if not to save himself, at least to get even with the rich pricks who don’t care if he and the rest of the unwashed billions live or die. Along the way, he ends up accidentally downloading a program that could save those billions, at the cost of his own life. And so another decision arrives.
Designed by the legendary Syd Mead, the man behind the look of films such as Blade Runner, Aliens and TRON, the film’s visuals are the best thing it has going for it. If nothing else, Blomkamp knows how to craft a world through images, giving 22nd-century Earth the feel of classic sci-fi by way of Slumdog Millionaire. Los Angeles is like a set from Black Hawk Down repopulated with androids, while Elysium itself is what the moon base from 2001: A Space Odyssey would look like with McMansions. Particularly impressive are small details such as tiny trademarks that adorn the genetically reconfigured skin of Elysium residents.
As with District 9, a superior first half focused on character and world-building gives way to a generic shoot-’em-up climax. Elysium is, ultimately and unfortunately, a movie about a muscly dude saving the world through the power of violence, and such movies are boring in their own particular way — any film about the fate of the world is, essentially, a movie about the fate of millions of people who, for better or for worse, are not much more than statistics.
The fate of one man will always be more dramatic than the fate of all mankind because we have specific reasons to care for one man. We can get to know one man and learn about his hopes and fears, failings and virtues. We can only know millions in the abstract, and so their fate is only interesting in an abstract, hard-to-pin-down way. Put another way: In Star Wars, the death of Ben Kenobi is a tragedy; the death of millions on Alderaan is just a plot point.
Elysium errs by making its climactic conflict about the fate of humanity itself, but it redeems that choice (at least somewhat) by tying the fate of humanity directly to the fate of Max himself. If he is to save the world, he must sacrifice himself. That’s a storytelling trope so elemental that there’s a major religion based around it.
The film is hardly perfect; the dialogue is functional at best and awkward-as-hell at worst. But it tells a whole story — one that’s driven by its characters and has a complete arc with an ending that follows logically from the beginning.
Elysium is a story about people navigating a limited set of options and facing the consequences of their actions. And, yes, there are some pretty cool explosions along the way.
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