A lot of money has been spent bringing Matt Damon home. From Saving Private Ryan to The Martian, Interstellar to The Odyssey, it’s become a genre unto itself. One of the strangest exceptions is Neil Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9, 2013’s Elysium. Poisoned in an industrial accident, Damon’s Max Da Costa fights to get to the advanced, floating city of Elysium in order to save his life. After it was pulled from Netflix back in April, the sci-fi action film is coming back to the service on August 1st. 

There’s Nothing Subtle About Elysium

You can say a lot about Neil Blomkamp’s films, but subtle isn’t one of them. Elysium is an on-the-nose allegory between the rich literally living above the rest of the planet in a floating city, and the poor, forced to struggle without supplies and support, even in life-or-death situations. Max, given only five days to live after being dosed with radiation, makes a deal with the hacker Spider to retrieve information on Elysium in return for a shuttle. He manages to get data from the brain of the man who built Elysium, but all it does is make him a target for the evil Defense Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and a crazed killer (Sharlto Copley, who spent the years after starring in District 9 doing nothing but lifting weights). 

Armed with an enhanced exoskeleton, Max has to fight his way up onto Elysium and invert an entire social order to save his life. Again, there’s no subtext to be found in Elysium. It looks great. The mix of low-tech cobbled-together parts against the sleek high-tech look of the floating city makes for striking visuals. It’s a shame that the plot can’t hold up its end of the bargain. 

Matt Damon wasn’t the first choice for Max. Originally, Blomkamp asked Eminem. Since the production wasn’t going to move to Detroit, that was out of the option, and the Academy Award-winning Damon stepped in. It’s fun to imagine how different Elysium would have been with Eminem. 

Neil Blomkamp’s Highly Anticipated Second Movie

After the surprise success of District 9, Hollywood was chomping at the bit for Blomkamp’s next movie. When Elysium barely turned a profit despite earning $286 million at the box office, the director’s meteoric rise started to reverse course. Chappie and Demonic both got less and less press each time, until he directed Gran Turismo for Sony, the first of his films he didn’t also write and produce. 

Elysium doesn’t work. It’s a great concept that stumbles in the execution, which Blomkamp has discussed in interviews, even going so far as talking about “re-doing” the concept of the floating city. In practice, it sounds a lot like Bioshock Infinite, another franchise that wouldn’t know the concept of subtlety if it popped up on scream and shouted, “Look! This is symbolism!”

Now that Elysium is heading back to Netflix on August 1st, it’s easy to stream and check out for yourself.