Matt Damon has played stranded astronauts, amnesiac assassins, and con men, but Elysium rarely comes up when discussing his best-known roles. Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 underrated dystopian thriller film casts him as Max Da Costa, a factory worker living on an overcrowded, polluted Earth while the wealthiest people have moved to Elysium, a pristine space station filled with mansions, green lawns, and medical pods capable of curing diseases and repairing severe injuries in minutes.

Max has little reason to think he will ever see Elysium until a workplace accident exposes him to a lethal dose of radiation. He is given five days to live, even though the technology that could save him is hovering above the planet. Other people on Earth face the same barrier. Families board unauthorized shuttles hoping to reach Elysium’s medical pods, while the station’s defenses are designed to stop them before they can get there.

Thirteen years later, the world Elysium imagined does not feel quite as distant. The dystopian sci-fi movie takes wealth inequality to its most literal sense by giving the rich an entirely separate world, then builds its story around who receives healthcare, who is allowed across the border, and who is left working dangerous jobs below. Blomkamp takes those inequalities to an extreme, but the idea underneath them is grounded in a real problem. The care exists. The problem is that only people with money and access are allowed to reach it.

Matt Damon’s Elysium Explained

Elysium takes place in 2154, with most of humanity crowded onto a polluted Earth while the wealthy live on a pristine orbital station above it. Damon plays Max Da Costa, an ex-con working at an Armadyne factory in Los Angeles. During one shift, he is ordered into a machine to clear a jam, the door seals behind him, and he is blasted with radiation. Doctors tell him he has five days to live.

That sends Max to Spider, a smuggler who launches unauthorized ships toward Elysium. Spider agrees to get him there if Max helps steal financial data from Armadyne CEO John Carlyle. Because the radiation has left Max barely able to stand, Spider’s crew bolts a powered exoskeleton directly onto his body before the mission. What they steal turns out to be far more valuable than money. Carlyle is carrying a program capable of rebooting Elysium’s entire computer system.

Max initially wants access to one Med-Bay so he can survive. By the end, he is carrying data that can rewrite Elysium’s citizenship system and legally recognize everyone on Earth as a citizen. Uploading it will kill him, but doing so unlocks the station’s medical resources for billions of people, including the daughter of Max’s childhood best friend, Frey.

Why It’s More Relevant Than Ever

Early in Elysium, several unauthorized shuttles leave Earth and head for the station with families desperate to get inside. Delacourt responds by ordering Kruger to destroy them before they can land. One ship slips through, and a mother rushes her sick daughter into an Elysium home and puts her inside a Med-Bay. The machine is capable of treating her within minutes, but it never gets that far. It scans the girl, identifies her as a noncitizen, and locks her out of the same medical care sitting inches away.

The problem is not that Elysium lacks the ability to help her. Its system is working exactly as designed. The Med-Bay recognizes that she does not belong there and denies her access. Max encounters that same indifference on Earth after police robots break his arm. At his parole meeting, he sits across from another machine that runs through preset questions while ignoring his request to speak with a human. Whether someone needs medical care or just wants to explain what happened to them, the decision has already been reduced to what the system says they are allowed to receive.

The people making those decisions are also insulated from their consequences. Delacourt does not have to board the shuttles or confront the families trying to reach Elysium. She sends Kruger to enforce the station’s borders for her, then cuts him loose once his brutality becomes a liability. The system keeps its leaders clean by pushing the violence onto people beneath them.

Thirteen years later, Elysium feels less like an exaggerated warning and more like a pointed one. The movie does not imagine a world where medicine, security, or comfort have disappeared. It imagines one where those things are readily available, but only to people with the right citizenship, money, and status. Everyone else can see what exists and understand exactly what could help them. The resources are there, but the rules decide who gets to use them.

Release Date

August 9, 2013

Runtime

109 minutes

Director

Neill Blomkamp

Writers

Neill Blomkamp

Producers

Bill Block