The transition from indie filmmaking to Hollywood is not always an easy one. For every Guillermo del Toro, seemingly able to flit between arthouse genius like Pan’s Labyrinth and spectacular blockbusters such as Pacific Rim without breaking sweat, there are countless others who handle their big new budgets like kids in a candy store and lose all focus. Two former indie directors both release big budget sci fi films this month, and the results couldn’t be more different.
South African director Neill Blomkamp shot to fame with the brilliant 2009 apartheid allegory District 9, in which aliens rescued from a spaceship stranded over Johannesburg are initially welcomed by the local populace, before being segregated in squalid camps. It may have worn its political heart too overtly on its sleeve for some but it was a fantastic film, combining breathtaking narrative, relatively low-budget special effects, and a charming central performance from first-time actor Sharlto Copley.
Blomkamp returns this month with his Hollywood debut Elysium, another sci-fi feature concerning apartheid and starring Copley. Sadly, that is where all similarities between the two films end. Set in the late 21st century, the Elysium of the title is a space station hosting luxury residential communities for the super-rich, who have abandoned Earth which is now a polluted, overpopulated wasteland. This economic inequality is further exacerbated by Elysium’s medbays, nifty electronic contraptions that scan the human body for disease or injury and repair it non-invasively, while down on Earth the inhabitants have to queue up at dirty, ill-equipped, overcrowded hospitals.
Enter Matt Damon as Max, ex-con turned factory worker, who is exposed to radiation after an industrial accident (itself the result of a broken arm sustained by Max during police harassment) and given five days to live. Knowing that reaching the medbays of Elysium is his only hope of survival, Max hooks up with a former partner in crime who promises him a free seat on an illegal shuttle provided he does one last job & agrees to use his brain to download brain data from a kidnapped businessman. This latter turns out to be the owner of the factory where Max works, who just happens to have entered into a coup pact with Elysium’s secretary of defence (played by a wildly overacting Jodie Foster), a woman with no qualms about blasting shuttles full of refugees out of the sky, and who sends hired goon Kruger (Copley, outdoing Foster in the overacting stakes) to capture Max and his incriminating data.
It’s at this point that what could have been an intelligent film about economic apartheid, healthcare, refugees and cyber-crime degenerates into a dull, grunting action movie, with lots of stabbing, punching and shooting but little in the way of narrative or dramatic tension. At a time when American politicians would rather suspend their country’s government than grant its neediest citizens free healthcare, Elysium could have been a wake-up call, but instead Blomkamp’s message is all but hidden behind loud explosions, dreadful acting and sadly typical Hollywood sentimentality, when a little restraint might have made Elysium a biting polemic on a par with his debut.
In Elysium, the inhabitants of Earth will do anything to get off the planet and head into space; in Gravity, the protagonists find themselves in the opposite situation, stranded in space and desperate to find a way back home. Like Blomkamp, director Alfonso Cuaron made his name in indie filmmaking with 2001’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, before moving to Hollywood where he already has Children of Men and one of the Harry Potter franchise to his name. His experience shows – Gravity is a restrained, sure-footed film which refuses to pander to short attention spans.
Five years in the making due to the enormous technological demands made by Cuaron’s vision, Gravity is a veritable feast for the eyeballs. I don’t generally hold with the “You’ve got to see it in the cinema!” cliché – sitting on my sofa with a glass of wine, undisturbed by coughers and popcorn munchers, is invariably the best way to see a film – but in Gravity’s case, for once it holds true. Watched in 3D on a big screen, it is like nothing you have ever seen, and the epic 13-minute opening sequence, in which scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes repairs to the Hubble space telescope, while pilot Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) spacewalks around her, the camera swooping and floating around and amongst them, is at times jaw-dropping. Indeed, in an age when CGI has all but destroyed our sense of wonder, it’s refreshing to find yourself sitting in a cinema and thinking “How the hell did they do that?” again.
Other incredible scenes linger in the memory. The camera zooms in on Bullock’s terrified face as she spins out of control, before slipping imperceptibly inside her helmet to see what she’s seeing; a space station explodes, shards of debris flying out of the screen; Bullock weeps at the console of an escape pod, and a single tear gradually floats towards us, slowly sharpening in focus as the rest of the scene becomes blurred. You might almost say that this is the film 3D was made for.
Bullock, whose track record in making films I’d rather shoot myself than pay to watch is unparalleled, is a revelation here, carrying most of the film single-handedly and beautifully portraying a woman out of her comfort zone and experiencing the conflict between wanting to simply curl up and die, and the natural human urge to survive. Clooney is Clooney, exuding old-school Hollywood/Rat Pack charm and insouciance despite being hidden behind a space suit for most of his time on screen; yet whilst it may sound clichéd, the relationship between his grizzled space veteran and Bullock’s jittery newbie is at the heart of Gravity, the contrast between his relaxed demeanour and refusal to panic and her sheer terror creating the dramatic tension that sustains the film.
One idea, handled beautifully, and transformed into a genuine cinematic work of art, will always trump half a dozen ideas thrown together and then drowned out with sound and fury. Go see Gravity on a big screen and rediscover your sense of cinematic wonder; give Elysium a wide berth.
Elysium: [Rating:2]
Gravity: [Rating:5]
