Elysium (2013)

Elysium, the much-anticipated second feature from writer/director Neill Blomkamp, is an absorbing and intelligent bit of sociologically pointed caste conflict futurism that builds on real, present catastrophes to craft the carefully constructed horrors to come. The year is 2154, and the world’s elite has long decamped for the titular gated community in the sky, while the less fortunate toil away on a decrepit and dangerous planet that has undergone economic and environmental collapse. The paradisiacal space station colony hovers just outside the Earth’s atmosphere, a short shuttle ride away, taunting the downtrodden proletarian masses with its unattainable proximity.

Sound vaguely familiar? That’s because the South Africa-born filmmaker once again goes for bold (if blunt) political parable, substituting a polluted, overpopulated, and largely Latino Los Angeles for the racially-charged Johannesburg of his previous film. Blomkamp came out of nowhere with 2009’s District 9, an action movie with an acute social consciousness that only thinly disguised its apartheid allegory in crustacean alien guise. An unexpected critical and commercial triumph  and a  low-budget aesthetic achievement, the visionary film did a lot with a little, the striking production design, cinematography, costuming, and effects seemingly, against all odds, willed into being by its young creator—Blomkamp was not yet thirty when shooting District 9, and working with a budget of fewer millions than he had years.

Four years have passed, and the director makes a poised entrance into mainstream popcorn cinema. Although the sets are grander and the stars more famous, Blomkamp maintains much of the grit and grime, intensity and ingenuity of District 9.Working with a larger canvas and a more conventional framework, his Elysium plays like a cross between its smaller, scrappier, and often more searing predecessor and a big-budgeted, little-minded blockbuster. 

After Earth (2013)

This father-son sci-fi wilderness adventure starring real-life father and son Will and Jaden Smith is nothing more than an overlong and overly sadistic obstacle course, both for its main character and the viewer. As the teenager hero of After Earth makes his way though dangerous territory, leaping from safe spot to safe spot, the movie leaps from lazy cliché to lazy cliché and listless life lesson to listless life lesson beat by predictable beat.

In the film’s exposition-heavy prologue we find out humankind now wears a lot of white unitards and moved to distant Nova Prime a thousand years ago because of Earth’s manmade downfall, elucidated through a stock montage of floods, fires, riots and explosions. The natives of our new home planet, none the happiest to be colonized however, have engineered super alien beasts known as Ursas—they are not bearlike, in case you were wondering—that are almost blind, but can track, hunt, and kill by smelling human pheromones—“they literally smell fear,” the voiceover helpfully explains. What I’ve just described—and so, so, so much more—could have easily been expanded into a full-length feature. Director M. Night Shyamalan squeezes it into about five minutes, and packs everything full of superficial details, justifications, and rationalizations that are both unnecessary and unimpressive.