Tag: Sharlto Copley

‘Elysium’: A Sci-Fi Immigration Parable

Elysium Movie Poster
I was surprised that I not only liked, but was impressed by Elysium. I had my doubts because it’s a Hollywood blockbuster, and their interpretation of the tenets of sci-fi usually leaves much to be desired. Also, I just really, really don’t like Matt Damon and his…face. The film centers around a poverty-stricken dystopian Earth and the lavishly constructed off-world satellite habitat, Elysium, where only the rich and powerful are allowed to live. Elysium doesn’t do much that’s interesting with gender, but its focus on class and race relations, particularly on immigration, is the heart and soul of this film.
There are only three women of note in Elysium. Matt Damon’s character, Max, is an orphan raised in a religious orphanage. There is one nun who doesn’t see him as a hopeless trouble-maker with no hope of a future. The film implies that many impoverished children who turn to crime have little in their home lives to bolster them and give them a sense of self-worth. This nun instills in young Max a sense of purpose, insisting that he has a destiny every bit as important as anyone on Elysium. Though this nun is compassionate, she exists primarily to show why Max is at his core a good person despite the hardness of his life and in spite of his path of crime. 
Then there’s Alice Braga’s Frey, a nurse who was Max’s childhood sweetheart. Frey has “made something of herself” and has a daughter, Matilda, who is dying. Frey, too, exists only as Max’s love interest and a symbol of motherhood. Frey is constantly under threat of rape by psychotic ex-military Kruger (played by Sharlto Copley) and his men who have kidnapped her in order to force compliance from Max. The looming threat of sexual violence only exists to showcase the effect such an eventuality would have on our hero. Frey would also risk everything to get her daughter to Elysium where healing machines are readily available in every home to cure her daughter of her terminal illness. The selfless, sacrificing mother is not a new or even interesting trope in cinema.
Frey becomes increasingly distressed as her daughter slips into a coma.
Finally, we have Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, Elysium’s Secretary of Defense. Delacourt is cold and casually cruel. Her power is not only emasculating, but she is a dangerous nationalist who resorts to illegality in order to protect the purity of Elysium from “illegals” who land on the satellite’s surface in rogue shuttles before scattering in the hopes of blending with Elysium citizens or at least acquiring medical care before being deported back to Earth. Delacourt has a great deal of power that she exercises freely, and she is extremely intelligent and even brilliant in the machinations of her overblown patriotism. However, the severe, emotionless, tyrannical female power figurehead is also not a new trope, and there’s little that makes Delacourt a complex or engaging character.
Jodi Foster’s sterile white pantsuit blends with the sterile white walls of Elysium’s “Administration.”
What is interesting about Elysium, however, is its overwhelmingly non-white cast. Most of the characters are Latino or Black, and it seems the primary language on Earth is Spanish. Our Earth setting is Los Angeles. Many of these disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth (including Max) are employed in manufacturing, spending their days making the very robots that secure Elysium against them. (They were pretty fucking cool robots, though.) Aside from Matt Damon, most of the white characters are either privileged people of wealth or figures of authority who are shown in a negative light. In fact, all the white characters with speaking roles are coded as “bad guys.” The racial dynamics in this film crystallize its sci-fi allegory for immigration. 
Technological genius and champion for immigrant citizenry, Spider, proposes a dangerous job to Max and his friend Julio.
After showing the desolation of Earth and the dire, unequal plight of its inhabitants, what is the solution Elysium poses to the so-called “immigration problem”? Indiscriminate citizenry for all. The tale becomes a fantasy of upending a brutal system that favors the wealthy few over the needs of the many, of destroying a government that privileges whiteness, denying rights and quality of life from people of color. That is a powerful, subversive fantasy that strikes very close to home. That, my friends, would mean revolution.

It certainly bothers me that Hollywood thinks our hero, Max, must be a white dude in order for his story to resonate with audiences, in order to lay bare the atrocities of the U.S’s immigrant situation (with Mexico in particular) in such a way that audiences can understand it. Without completely shifting the racial dynamics, Elysium becomes a version of White Man’s Burden, assuming that audiences can’t empathize with a hero of color and cannot put themselves in the hero’s shoes unless they can racially identify with him. There are two fallacies in this notion, 1.) that the default human being is a man, and 2.) that the default human being is a white man.

Elysium orbits Earth.

I can only hope that one day, Hollywood will realize it’s wrong about its insistence on white male leads in films…and that Hollywood will actually be wrong about it.  Hey, a blockbuster that wears its immigration agenda on its sleeve is something you don’t see very often, so maybe we’re getting closer to the day when we don’t have to hide behind genre to tell a topical political tale and the day when we don’t need to have a white man tell us such an important story.

‘Europa Report’: For the Love of Sci-Fi

Europa Report Poster
Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Ecuadorian Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report is a new kind of movie. The film centers around an unprecedented trip to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, based on evidence that the moon could perhaps support life. The movie does blend a documentary style with thriller, science fiction, and even horror genres in an interesting, gripping manner, but the narrative itself is differently constructed, which is what makes Europa Report such a unique pleasure to watch.  
Though not tremendously racially diverse (the male captain is Asian and one of the male mission control scientists is Black), the film treats its female characters not only as equals, but as elite scientists and essential components of perhaps the most important space exploration humans have ever undergone. 
We have three strong, smart, respected female characters. There’s Dr. Samantha Unger, portrayed by the talented Embeth Davidtz. Dr. Unger is the primary mission planner. Her on-the-ground/mission control perspective is the one that has the most narrative cohesiveness and authority. Europa One is her opus, and its success or failure along with the lives of its crew are her responsibility. 
Dr. Samantha Unger contemplates the loss of communication with Europa One.
Then there’s science officer Dr. Katya Petrovna played by Karolina Wydra. Dr. Petrovna has a background in marine biology, which is crucial considering the life that the crew seeks on Europa would be in the water beneath the moon’s ice-encrusted surface. She is not only excellent at her job, but she is compassionate, brave, and full of wonder as the first human being to set foot on Europa’s moon surface. That’s right, a woman takes the greatest leap in science and exploration for all mankind.
To ensure the success of the mission, Katya risks her life on the unstable icy and radiation-flooded surface to collect vital samples.
Lastly, there’s the ship’s pilot Rosa Dasque played by Anamaria Marinca. She is drawn to the glory of the mission: a true explorer, seeking out the unknown, desirous of stretching the boundaries of human knowledge and experience. She, too, is strong and self-sacrificing with an admirable rationality and sense of her place and scope within the universe. My favorite line in the movie is when Rosa says, “Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?” Heavy shit, no?
In a way, Rosa is our Ripley on Europa One.
So, except for one scene in which Jim Corrigan (played by District 9‘s Sharlto Copley) sexistly jokes that the female crewmen weren’t allotted enough outfits and shoes, Europa Report takes its female characters quite seriously, giving their expertise, ideas, and opinions the respect they deserve, not only as women but as fellow explorers whose lives and knowledge are every bit as valuable as their male counterparts.
Europa One crew posing for its last picture all together.
This, however, isn’t where the film’s innovative approach ends. In fact, the non-issue of female worth and sexuality aboard this space vessel is actually a small part of the bigger picture that Europa Report is trying to foster. At first, I was surprised that the crew all gets along. Despite that we are given few personal details about the explorers, I still developed a sense of empathy towards them, but it’s important that our understanding of them develops almost entirely within the context of this mission. Though there is wonder, comradery, fear, loss, and chaos, this isn’t a story about human drama. The elements for that kind of drama are there, but they are intentionally underplayed. 
The point of the film is that this crew is doing something bigger than themselves, perhaps bigger than all of us. None of the crew ever forgets that, and we, as the audience, are never allowed to either. As they resign themselves to bad situations and make noble decisions, the film tells us that in the face of this  “cosmically astounding” experience and opportunity, they could do nothing else. It all comes back to Rosa’s words, “Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?” The crew’s unity in its genuine quest for discovery simply for the sake of knowledge is inspiring, reminding us of the universe’s wonders beyond our human smallness and pettiness, beyond our current scope of understanding.
Katya’s breathtaking view of Jupiter from Europa’s moon surface.
I loved this movie. Europa Report‘s elegant cinematography and unique approach in the telling of a simple story are refreshing, intellectually interesting, and posit more about humanity than seems possible on the film’s surface. I can’t wait to watch it again.
***If your local theater isn’t showing Europa Report, it’s rentable on iTunes***