Matt Damon's Near-Perfect 109-Minute Dystopian Sci-Fi Epic Is Officially Streaming on Netflix
The grounded everyman steps up to save the day
Matt Damon has always had a knack for playing extraordinary leading men in movies. His performance as the cunning, resourceful Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey makes perfect sense once you consider Damon’s decades-spanning filmography. Films like Good Will Hunting (1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and the Bourne (2002-2016) series showcase the actor's incredible range in playing larger-than-life characters with varying moral compasses. Then there’s 2011’s Contagion, where Damon plays Mitch Emhoff, the quintessential “everyman” whose lack of specialized knowledge informs the character’s anxiety-ridden arc.
Damon’s naturalistic portrayal of such an ordinary character seeped into Max Da Costa in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), where he plays a former car thief out on parole who suddenly becomes the hero who must save Earth. Blomkamp’s film, while perfectly serviceable, feels like a step down from District 9 (2009) and Chappie (2015), which indulge in his brilliant cinéma vérité style of filmmaking. Even so, Elysium is held together by committed performances from Damon and the rest of the cast, who make the most out of a movie with immense potential. Since Elysium landed on Netflix on Aug. 1, you can now watch this dystopian sci-fi flick for free.
The film opens in the year 2154, with a heavily polluted and overpopulated Earth paying the price for environmental destruction. While most humans on Earth live in poverty, the ultra-wealthy reside in a high-tech orbital space station called Elysium. The most enviable aspect of Elysium has nothing to do with a luxurious lifestyle — instead, its coveted nature lies in the fact that the space station’s Med-Bays can heal any disease or health condition. A hacker named Spider (Wagner Moura) fights this unjust system by smuggling people into Elysium, but Defense Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) doesn’t take to this kindly.
Damon’s Max is not a rebel like Spider. Instead, he’s an ex-thief who has been wronged by the system after being accidentally exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. Although his employers, Armadyne Corp, grant him medication to help suppress side effects, he has five days left to live. While Max’s previous crimes were necessitated by survival, this extreme life-or-death situation completely radicalizes him.
After healthcare no longer feels like a right, but a luxury, Max is forced to abandon his efforts to put his head down and rehabilitate. The moving transformation unfolds when Max’s motive to survive gradually shifts to a desire to dismantle Elysium so that others like him can have access to basic healthcare. However, Max isn’t trying to be a hero. His desperate circumstances put him on a path filled with impossible choices and particularly vicious enemies.
Elysium mounts a scathing commentary about class division while passionately championing the right to a dignified life. This is hardly a revolutionary theme for an early 2000s sci-fi movie, especially as Blomkamp’s film seems satisfied with a rudimentary, surface-level exploration (which feels like squandered potential, given what we know the director is capable of). Despite this major flaw, Elysium is still pretty entertaining, thanks to Damon’s physically demanding performance as Max, who later dons a sturdy exoskeleton to boost his declining health. There’s also a vulnerability to this character that most heroes of this mold don’t exude, channeled via Damon’s personable presence as a man who spends his final days making a difference in the world rather than wallowing.
It is interesting to note that Damon would go on to star as the deceitful Dr. Mann in Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), a year after Elysium. Mann is no everyman, but he hides his troubling motivations in plain sight without rousing suspicion until his true colors are revealed. 2023 would see Damon’s turn as General Leslie Groves in Oppenheimer, where he embodied a shrewd, no-nonsense demeanor to guide the lofty ambitions of Cillian Murphy’s titular character. While we shall witness Damon’s turn as Odysseus on July 17 (early critical impressions of The Odyssey are calling it his “career-best” performance), the character is a far cry from someone as grounded as Max Da Costa. After all, Odysseus’ supreme cunning and hubris have earned him the title of the Greek hero who decisively turned the tides of the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad.
Elysium might feel like a middling sci-fi affair, but it is an adventure that’s well worth your time due to Damon’s seasoned presence (alongside Foster and the wonderful Sharlto Copley, who plays Agent M. Kruger). It is a film that makes reasonably good use of its kinetic action sequences to impart a heavy-handed lesson about wealth inequity and the importance of raging against a system designed to keep us complacent.
Elysium may not rank among Damon's greatest films, but it remains one of the clearest examples of what makes him such an enduring leading man: His ability to make extraordinary circumstances feel deeply human, and his capacity to make even a regular guy feel more than a bit heroic.
Elysium is streaming on Netflix.