'Gun Machine' - Warren Ellis Sidelines the Strange to Kick Grit in Our Face

It's funny: ofttimes writers can work so prolifically and so well in a particular genre it can be disquieting, even outright bizarre, when one suddenly takes a soft left into a narrative that rings familiar but proves a different beast altogether. We get used to seeing certain names indelibly affixed to certain brands and lazily assume those names will continue to serve from the same tap every time. It's a foolish assumption of course, and thank God for that, for what sort of a world would it be if our bards didn't force us to do the occasional double-take?

In the case of Gun Machine, it was I who was lazy, or at the very least a wee presumptuous, taking it as a given that Warren Ellis would cast his readers off into another theater of the demented and the baffling, which has been the mad Scotsman's de rigueur for quite some time now. What I got instead was a damned entertaining mystery that resembled some of the more popular police procedurals of today. Think the gravitas of a Law and Order blended full tilt with some of the post-Saw, creep-tastic MOs of Criminal Minds and some playful Castle-esque banter tossed in for fun. It isn't Ellis exactly as we'd expect, and that's the lion's share of the fun of this book.

Those who've heard of Ellis probably know he writes comics. Fans of Ellis know those comics usually involve a cutting, warts-and-all look at subjects traditionally coated in candy and laminate, sanitized for mass-production; subjects he is more than happy to gut-punch and drown in irony and blood until the veneer sloughs off, exposing the awful truths hiding beneath. With The Authority he gave us a positively seditious take on the Justice League and other such 'super teams'; with Transmetropolitan he foretold a future where politicians lie for money and the most popular junk food was caribou eyes, and introduced us to Spider Jerusalem, the last honest investigative reporter who also happened to be the most hateful human being in the universe. Then Mr. Ellis tried his hand at crime fiction with 2002's Crooked Little Vein, a hilarious knock on the old private-eye-with-a-problem trope. Ellis's trademark is his sick sense of humor and pervasive nihilism, an ever-present “we're all screwed” attitude that gives his fiction a wicked free-spiritedness.

So it would only be natural to figure Gun Machine to be another entry in his journal of the darkling absurd. But instead we meet John Tallow, a surprisingly ordinary NYC detective with that (sadly) very ordinary affliction of being burned out, ground down, and thoroughly bored with the daily slog of policing the greatest city in the world. He's an introvert who loves music and has a fondness for history that he hasn't the time or the energy at the end of the day to really pursue. Everything changes in a flash when his partner is gunned down during a routine domestic disturbance and he uncovers an enormous cache of guns laid out like museum pieces in an otherwise innocuous apartment. Saddled with the hopeless investigation, Tallow delves into the puzzle of how the strange arsenal came to be there and why the vast assortment of weapons appears to have been laid out in a pre-ordained, ritualistic pattern. Shellshocked and treated like damaged goods by his unbelieving superiors, John uncovers a web of lies stretching back to the dawn of America when Manhattan was holy ground, and becomes the target of a mysterious killer who seems to walk through past and present like a deranged spirit.

This is a more mature and better-written story than Crooked Little Vein, though Ellis traditionalists might balk at the absence of loonier elements. I know I did at first, until I realized I was truly engaged in the mystery; after thirty pages I found I wasn't really 'missing' anything, though I was keen enough to notice when some vintage Ellis crept in, as it occasionally does. Eschewing the wonky, Gun Machine follows Tallow's investigation along a logical path and presents ample twists without delving into great complexity or world-building minutiae.

Character is key. Tallow is a sympathetic hero and a believable protagonist with just enough in the way of quirks to make him interesting; a guy you can root for whom you'd never find in central casting. Even before the tragedy that claims his partner, John is a quiet guy who is painfully aware of his lack of social skills and who has taken the appropriate steps to accommodate that, never marrying, drinking alone, keeping to himself. The pleasure is in seeing his character galvanized out of inertia, goaded into never phoning it in again, and putting his nose back on the grindstone to solve a case that everyone but he knows is destined for failure. In so doing he reveals his hermitic (and impressive) detective skills and a cunning survival instinct that baffles his detractors and surprises those who are set against him.

Ellis seeds the novel with a terrific supporting cast, namely the two CSU cave-dwellers Scarly and Bat, a lesbian hardass and passive-aggressive uber-nerd respectively, and the strange figure known only as 'The Hunter' who may or may not be supernatural in origin. The author has a remarkable sense of propriety when it comes to dolling out the endearing and the weird, never going over the top but at no point leaving us too comfortable with the players, just as the players never seem completely comfortable with Tallow and his head-first immersion in the investigation. They, as we, are left wondering if our hero isn't becoming unhinged, or if he wasn't already before the story began.

Ellis writes excellent prose: literate and fun, to-the-point and very sly; the perfect style for a cop drama that reads like spiked punch and elicits a laugh at all the right moments. It's a quick read and thus a little light on the details; indeed, one almost wonders if there isn't a little too much restraint in the research department, but Ellis makes up for it with a handful of scenes that are so patient and meticulously paced they seem ready-made for the screen (which is not a coincidence, as Gun Machine has been optioned for film). Ultimately the greatest complaint is that the ride is over too fast and we're left with only a brief glimpse into the lives of some good folks we wish we could get to know better. Maybe Ellis will oblige us with a sequel in the future, but for now he seems to be enjoying that enviable niche where he can write a standalone novel that tells the tale and not get shoehorned into a six-book engagement.

At this point, I think he's earned it. 

Saints Row IV - Asking Your Sandbox 'Why So Serious?'

I can count on one hand the number of game series I've started in medias res, diving straight into a title with a number attached to it without having sampled its progenitors first. I can use that same hand and spare a couple of fingers for the number of series on that list where continuity has really mattered one lick and I've felt genuinely poorer for having not begun at the beginning. There's a slice of the gaming population out there who will regard this next statement as sacrilege, but prior to Saints Row IV had NEVER played another game in that series. Hell, that's probably offensive on more than one level. After all, for a gamer never to have experienced one of the most celebrated and beloved open-world action mash-up sagas is to call into question my sacred street cred, no? And for me to have the temerity to pass judgment on its FOURTH incarnation bereft of context, backstory or any frame of reference could be considered akin to evaluating Indiana Jones from nothing but Shia Labeouf and the Kingdom of the Crystal Monkeys.

But play SR4 for any length of time and one aspect about this game and its developers will emerge tantamount above all others:

Saints Row could give a shit about continuity.

Or context. Or backstory. In fact, in the spirit of this crazed, bizarre, utterly ludicrous acid trip-slash geek love letter of a game, I humbly submit that it is I, the Saints Row virgin, who is uniquely qualified to make a unbiased assessment. You won't find me trying to thread logic into this review because precious little of it exists in this game's sprawling world, and God love it, I think – I really do think – that's the point.

The sum total of my knowledge of the Saint's Row franchise going in was this: Grand Theft Auto meets the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. Like GTA, that venerated epic of carnage and criminality, it was a free-roaming sandbox series that gave the player maximum freedom and minimum rules while knocking off a laundry list of laundry lists of side quests, challenges, mini-games, and some more difficult missions here and there that more or less resembled a story. I knew from glancing at the occasional headline and skimming some media that the 'hook' which made the series stand out from RockStar's line was a penchant for bright colors, absurd set pieces, wildly over-the-top action, and an unapologetic predisposition toward the absurd. It was a GTA that refused to take itself seriously, a series about carjackings and revenge killings that purposely dodged gallows humor in favor of shock, schtick and outright lunacy. I'm reminded of George Carlin's contrasting of a maniac and a crazy person: a maniac will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo; a crazy person will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo but he'll be wearing a Bugs Bunny costume at the time.

Saints Row sets out to be that crazy person to GTA's mere maniac, and it's Bugs Bunny costume is flamboyant shade of purple.

Saint's Row IV feels like the end result of a writer's room filled with spectacular ideas, too much coffee and no supervisors present to stifle the creative process, every base impulse and hilarious in-joke thrown into a blender set on 'puree'. There are a bevy of influences from pop culture, film, hardcore geekdom and scores of other games, all whipped into a schizoid froth and topped with what I now realize is trademark Saints Row abandon. It's a title that begs you to have fun. And hell, if you're already strapped into the ride you might as well put your hands up and enjoy the rush. Is it perfect? It is not. But we're talking about a game where even the flaws seem almost intentional; an experience not unlike the film Tropic Thunder (to cite just one contemporary example) where you're frequently left wondering just what components are wry, elbowing satire and which parts are just fun for the bloody hell of it.

The brief opening voice over constitutes just about the longest and most comprehensive sampling of true exposition you'll find throughout the gameplay. In a very efficient nutshell it describes the history of the Third Street Saints, first a gang purging their city of rival factions and ushering in their own brand of urban renewal, later a pop culture phenomenon whose exploits were followed across the globe. Flash forward a couple titles later to the present, when the Saints have ridden their wave of popularity into the White House – yes, that White House, and you Mr. And/Or Mrs. Gamer, are the Commander-in-Chief, holding court over a West Wing replete with poker, drinking games, Siberian tigers, pimped-out advisors, and scantily clad staffers. Basically Bill Clinton's favorite recurring dream. Until, that is, the aliens arrive.

PROTECT THE BABES!

Yes, the morning press briefing is interrupted by a full-scale alien invasion courtesy of the Zin and their erudite leader, Zinyak, an imposing, autocratic dick who looks like someone took one of George Lucas's background creatures and put him on P90X. Mayhem ensues, and when the smoke clears you are Zinyak's captive, imprisoned in a virtual reality simulation that recreates to the finest detail the industrial metropolis of Steelport, which will be your playground for most of the rest of the game.

What follows is any number of tributes/homages/rip-offs/copyright infringements on The Matrix, but it seems abundantly clear from the outset that the parallels are both blatantly intentional and lovingly replicated. Like Neo you are merely a digital recreation of your real self, and like Neo you can, with practice and a little help from your friends, bend and break the rules of the simulation and manipulate physics as you see fit. Your ultimate goal is to screw with Zinyak's fake world to the point that the program will break down and collapse. At first your efforts constitute a simple fight for freedom as you struggle to break from shackles of the sim, but later it will serve as the last, best hope of retaliating against the aliens and exacting vengeance for crimes against humanity. That's the gist of it.

Here begineth the laundry list. In addition to the main missions, there are scads of extraneous chores and amusing distractions to keep you glued to the controller; it's difficult (but certainly not impossible) to get bored during even a protracted session thanks to the sheer variety of crap you can do, to say nothing of the simple joy of exploration. Every achievement, every vanquished foe, every item on a generous list of milestones both trivial and significant earns you cash (or 'cache' – get it?) and points you can allocate to an intimidating selection of upgrades and unlockables. Everything can be customized, starting with your character model, then on to your clothes, hair, shoes, bling, tats, and, of course, your ride. Like GTA and the other Saints Row titles, the world is yours to carjack: hot rods, mack trucks, crotch rockets, helicopters, and yes, even alien hover tanks and UFOs; if you can touch it, you can steal it. Abscond with a vehicle, or earn it with missions, and you can pimp that out to a fair thee well, too, including paint jobs, rims, engines...Hell, you can even decide how tinted you want the windshield to be. You even get to pick your character's voice actor, which for seasoned gamers is no choice at all, as one of the options is the industry's golden god, the spectacular Nolan North, aka Uncharted's Nathan Drake, who clearly had as much fun recording the dialogue as you'll have making him say stuff.

[SIDE NOTE ON THE VOICE WORK: Keith David, that masterful, granite-voiced legend of stage and screen plays himself : actor turned Third Street Saint turned VP of the USA, brandishing an alien ray gun and swearing up a storm. How can a geek not grin like it's free comic day?]

Of course Neo wasn't just Neo, was he? No, he was also The One, and owing to that the developers decided cars and guns are great, but superpowers are what makes a virtual city a playground worth putting in the extra hours. It isn't long before you're able to say goodbye to limits entirely and soup yourself up in the same manner as your transports: super speed, telekinesis, the ubiquitous fire from your fingertips, and leaping tall buildings – or entire suburbs – in a single bound. Think Infamous stuck in overdrive. This is where SR4's fun factor hits the nitro, giving you a potpourri of abilities that make combat a silly blast and bequeathing you with a freedom of movement rarely if ever seen in open-world games. Powers are upgradeable, too, and once you've experienced the thrill of using your start-up abilities you're likely to spend considerable time earning cheddar to reach new plateaus until you've achieved Superman status. Suddenly Steelport feels less like a city and more like a neon, 21^st century Bouncy-bounce, easily traversed from coast-to-coast in a few blurry seconds.

Cause havoc if you wish, but laying waste to the city will yield consequences in the form of an ever-escalating alien response; the more of a pain in the ass you are, the more resistance you can expect. And while you are powerful, and your assets are fortified with a generous compliment of exotic weapons (also game for enhancement), your abilities require cooldown and you can always run out of ammo. So your efforts against the Zin will still resemble guerrilla warfare: destroying enemy strongholds, assassinating rogue programs, scaling and claiming massive broadcast towers, and winning back your fake city one fake block at a time, gradually turing Steelport's sizable map into a field of Saint's-controlled purple. Succeeding in any of the many activities will win you territory, but the story missions are the most complex and challenging; the game really takes its time doling out the primary features – expect to do a dozen or more main quests before the full scope of your resources are made available to you.

Having set the stage and costumed their cast, developer Volition then takes it upon itself to screw with as many video game conventions as possible. Thinking you're in a straight-up sandbox is to invite any number of baffling moments and WTF departures from conventional gameplay that will have you alternately scratching your head and bawling with laughter. I won't reveal all in the interest of spoilerlessness (whoa, new word), but here's an example: during a rescue mission you are quite spontaneously plunged into not one but two freaky spells of gameplay that just seem to piss all over the fourth wall: first a tank battle/motorcycle race in a laser kaleidoscope environ straight out of the old Macintosh Spectre 3D then, minutes later, in a simulated 8-pixel RPG setup recalling the text-only adventures made famous by DOS and Apple II. That you're forced to swallow all this strange wine inside of ten minutes is one thing, but you'll do yourself a disservice unless you can also spare enough attention to chase down the barrage of references from 80's films like Wargames and the mother of all inside jokes for fans of the Mass Effect series. And did I mention Steelport's main drag is lined with statues of the three-breasted hooker from Total Recall? I didn't? Seems like the kind of thing I would mention before now. Like I said, the developers must have loved coming to work for this one.

The veneer does peel after a while, though that shouldn't come as a wallet-closer of a reveal. Like all open-world, what-you-will realms, eventually the streets of the virtual city become well-trod and familiar. Action becomes a bit like day-old bread, too, especially as you upgrade to the point of being over-powered; sooner or later you learn every enemy's weakness and dispatching even a small army of foes becomes a simple matter of applying the correct foil to the appropriate target. This is where the variety of tricks and weapons becomes somewhat redundant , bordering on useless: there is a smorgasbord of bizarre guns, but many of them are gimmicky and inefficient, more impressive for dazzling gawkers at E3 than for in-game use. Why employ the Abduct-O-Ray when a pump shotgun works better? To be fair, the variety encourages swapping your strategies, as you might prefer to blast Zin from a distance with massive area-of-effect weapons rather than tackle them one at a time at point-blank range. But the outcome of a fight is rarely in doubt. And while completionists will delight in the literally thousands of collectibles, medals and activities, the tasks will gradually morph from Herculean to plebeian.

Crap...did I remember to lock the front door?

Likewise your superpowers enhance your mobility to the point where the vehicle component is functionally obsolete. Why steal a Fiat and drive it across town when you can burn pavement like The Flash or glide across the cityscape like a base jumper? This more than anything will likely stick in the craw of some GTA purists (and woe unto our aging, graying gamer community, now crossing the Rubicon of calling Grand Theft Auto players pure of anything): the thrill of the steal, the street race, the chopshop and the getaway – while present in SR4 – is simply peripheral. The danger isn't there; the desperation: that sweaty, slip-trip headlong flight from overwhelming odds dodging gunfire and vaulting drainage ditches while scrambling for a dirt bike, a Chevy Nova, a moving van –anything to get away – simply CAN'T be there when you know you can lunge into the next county courtesy of there being No Spoon. Naturally players are perfectly welcome to go at it like the past titles and felonize to their heart's content; the game will still be there with oodles of support and some tight driving physics to boot. Plus there will always be that strange sort of pride that comes with tailoring your ill-gotten booty to your desires, so if nothing else cars and bikes are great fodder for the fine-tuners of us who like to put their personal stamp on everything.

Those observations shouldn't discourage the player who wants to spend some endorphin-pumping good times tickling the reward center of his or her brain. SR4 is clearly meant as more of a journey than a destination, a collage of playful and harebrained with a concentrated dose of self-deprecating sentience, primal scream therapy tacked haphazardly to a master class in subversion. You don't have to have been a Saint to enjoy it, but you better hope you look good in purple.  

'Elysium' - The Meek Have Inherited the Earth...Lucky Them

You have to wonder where Neill Blomkamp's career would be without dust.

Elysium is lousy with dust, as well as sand, and grit and grime and soot and detritus of every genus and phylum; it curdles in delicate puffs at the character's feet in low moments and billows in great plumes during the high ones; it crusts over every surface like a fine October frost and infuses the already muted color palate with a pervasive dun-meets-desert scheme that both suggests and sustains the mood of the picture throughout. It is also a brilliant tool for fudging the insertion of visual effects into an otherwise real shot, smoothing any CGI crinkles that might endanger the verisimilitude of the scene. Truly, 22nd-century flying machines look no different than the silt-filmed Blackhawks we see swooping around on CNN. The result, here as in Blomkamp's stellar District 9, is a seamless optical beatdown that keeps you alert and engaged almost irrespective of what else is going on. It is one of the real charms of this film as a work of sci-fi, that it can be so compulsively watchable while disguising the graphical trickery there to remind us we're watching a story set in the future.

And what a future. It's 2154, which in the annals of science fiction is like America, 1968: nothing good ever seems to happen in that year. Earth is an unholy mess: her woefully swollen population is beset by miserable health and staggering unemployment, her skies are irreversibly clogged with pollutants and it seems just about every natural resource on the planet has been permanently reclassified as a commodity reserved for the fortunate few. The super rich who still depend on the disaffected hordes for industrial production have expatriated themselves to the massive space station Elysium high above the Earth, to the only vantage point left where home looks homey and not like a hovel. Here the One Percenters live an eloi existence free of disease, dress in pastels and host swanky dinner parties at any number of their innumerable mansions. Think Babylon 5 meets the Bushwood Country Club albeit nary a Bill Murray or puppet gopher to be seen. Charged with maintaining station security – or is it purity? - is the iron-eyed Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster), who reminds me both of Donald Rumsfeld and Catherine O'Hara's Delia Deetz from Beetlejuice: buttoned-up, craving control, not all there, prefers the messier solution and never once tried to catch more flies with honey.

Back in the squalor of Los Angeles we meet Max (Matt Damon), ex-car thief turned nobody; a blue-collar cog who is one of the lucky few to hold a job (at a robot factory, no less) and thus have an infinitesimally better chance of someday purchasing a ticket onto Elysium himself. Like Wikus van de Merwe, the unremarkable protagonist of District 9, Max never goes in search of trouble but nonetheless finds himself in a heap of it, and is forced to try a desperate infiltration of the space colony, ticket or no, before he dies from radiation poisoning, the result of an honest accident on a particularly bad day at work. He returns to the criminal fold in order to heist the needed cash, conspiring to steal crucial data from the bionic implant of one of the Elysium elite (a criminally underutilized William Fichtner). Unfortunately for Max this particular pigeon has a conspiracy of his own: he's planning to seize leadership of the space station with Delacourt. That's right, it's COUPS...IN...SPACE! Just like that, Max's ill-timed info thievery crams irrefutable proof of the treachery into his handsomely shaved head. Suddenly everyone has an excuse to run really fast and stumble like they're almost but not quite going to trip.

Elysium is a good story that touches on very good at least a handful of times with flickers of real profundity here and there. It falls short of a masterpiece, which is not a criticism per se for two reasons: I don't know that it ever really tries to be a masterpiece, and the reasons it drops a bit short of the brilliant mark are nebulous and somewhat subjective anyway. There are many things to like about it but no one thing, or even a parcel of things, to which you can definitively point and say 'but that's why it was merely good.' I think by and large Blomkamp, who penned the script in addition to working the camera, was trying to tell a ripping fun yarn that had a thing or two to say about the human condition and how we conduct our lives, which is all any good sci-fi can hope to do and probably more than can reasonably expected in today's drool first-think never cinema.

I suspect an awful lot of ink will be destroyed in the name of dissecting Elysium's 'symbolism' and 'metaphor'; veiled concepts we're supposed to pair one potential allegory at a time to present day lest we be accused of being unthinking cretins. In movies this is a phenomena unique to speculative and future-pieces: sci-fi has wormed its way into the mainstream yet is still considered something of a 'fringe' genre that plays to an intelligent crowd, thus it has become every critic's burden to dig for a work's meaning or else risk the stigma of having 'missed the point'. No one ever worries about this in horror films – when the scary doll with the Stephen Hawking voice box forces the hero to flay his scrotum off with a carrot peeler you don't try to relate it to Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets. Yet with sci-fi everyone seems so preoccupied with context they often overlook the possibility that there is none.

Don't mistake me: Elysium IS an allegory, but it's an allegory the same way Bryan Adams is performance art: it wears its message on its sleeve and leaves introspection to more epic fare. You'd have to be a shade dimmer than Hodor not to realize the whole flick is holding a mirror up to the immigrant crisis (and while we use that misleading phrase most often here in America, the plight of itinerant peoples and their effect on established societies is a tale much older than the good ol' US of A). Still, the comparisons come frequent and fast and look like nothing else than the sort of things we see on the news so often. In the first and most heavy-handed example, a gaggle of Earth refugees successfully breach Elysium's perimeter and scatter in every direction to avoid capture. The scene, shown to us from the POV of a night-vision security feed, replicates down to the last pixel the now-familiar camera footage from border patrol choppers pursuing fleeing illegals from points south. That's as blatant as it gets, thankfully, but it's never subtle; at no point does Blomkamp presume to pull wool over our eyes and pretend this story isn't heavily influence by current events.

I'll acknowledge there are more interpretive moments that may or may not constitute commentary on other topics depending on how meta you want to be, from health care to race relations to foreign policy. I smirked a little when a desperate Max, replete with broken arm, radiation poisoning and a stab wound is rebuffed by his winsome doctor friend, who dispassionately informs him “If you want treatment, you'll have to go through the system”. But to belabor the issue by trying to assign a parallel to everything is to waste time pointing out the patently obvious.

Okay, I'll waste a little time.

See, if Elysium misses the four-star mark it might be because the script fails to see its allegory all the way through, or similarly because its attempt to extrapolate present day conflicts into a grounded predication of the future isn't always logical. Part of what made District 9 such a harrowing experience was the almost total lack of expository hand-holding and pre-fab explanations that accompany so many sci-fi films these days. As then so now, it is up to the viewer to deduce how events might have fallen into place at Point A and determine whether those suppositions gel with the intent of the filmmakers when they present Point Z. In the case of Elysium, however, Blomkamp's penchant for austere intros and spartan backstory might have left the door open for some legitimate questions.

We're told, for example, that the lords and ladies of Elysium still depend on the little people of Earth for industrial output and therefore their precious dinero. We're also told that they have cultivated miraculous technology that not only cures disease and prolongs life, but that this technology's curative powers are 100% effective, painless and near-instantaneous; banishing advanced-stage leukemia is no different than trimming your fingernails. Why, then, would the beautiful people not share this no-maintenance miracle science with the workers on whom so much depends, workers who are riddled with disease beyond measure and live such brief, terrible lives? No less of an authority than Moses himself – channeled through Charlton Heston – said it best when discussing the molding of Egyptian bricks: “The strong make many, the weak make few...the dead make none.”  Seems to me a healthy worker would have a powerful incentive to stop screwing around and keep turning those wrenches, where anyone in Max's situation would be more likely to throw up his hands and say “Screw this; you guys want to mop the floors, you can come down off your space station and do it yer damn selves.”

At this point some folks may argue that sickness combined with the allure of earning your way into Elysium would be a shrewd tactic for keeping the masses in check, but remember that employment in this world is a rarity and the VAST majority of people are perpetually jobless and have no hope of a better life. Here the absence of exposition starts to chip away at the foundations of the script: we're never told just how much money it takes to buy a ticket to Elysium, we're never told how many of the unwashed have ever purchased said ticket, nor are we ever made privy to how close Max might be to a golden pass of his own. All we DO know is that the unemployed are so desperate to reach the station that they're willing to chance the more likely scenario that they'll be shot out the sky or picked off like so many pheasants at a trap shoot should they breach Elysium space. So diligent worker or barbarian at the gate, your chances of seeing the promised land are about equal, which is about squat. Why, then, would you work at all? For while the teeming masses of Earth certainly aren't comfortable, they don't appear to be starving in the streets (nor, by the way, must they pay much in taxes), and an early scene establishes that people with jobs are in fact the target of good-natured mockery from smiling children kicking soccer balls. If they're joking about it, they can't be that hard up for honest work.

The implication might be that the Earth is SO populous that a labor force can be hired, fired and replaced on a whim, but then how could you possibly ensure quality control? Max's job isn't making license plates for crying out loud, it's making robots! That has to require at least a month or two of training, and how can you be certain your company is making the best damn robot it can make when your illiterate, untrained employees are dropping in the aisles from measles and cancer and clubfoot? Perhaps if the curative technology was expensive, or demanded a super-precious resource, or had a finite number of uses before burning out we might understand why it is so carefully horded, but the point is we're never told ANY of that. Or perhaps, if Earth is Mexico and Elysium is America, we could say the parallel holds up if Mexico was making America's cars, or jumbo jets or computers, but they don't and they aren't. And if Elysium needs still needs Earth to make cheap hoodies, expensive sneakers and affordable pantsuits after 150 years, then they didn't really prioritize when they constructed a city in space, now did they?

Plot hole? Not really. It's more a personal choice on Blomkamp's part of what he elected to tell us going in, or what he chose to leave on the cutting room floor. The tradeoff, by the way, for this lean script is a correspondingly lean movie; it clocks in at under two hours, which is a coup by another name in this age of bladder-busting epics.

One last turd in the punchbowl: Foster's performance. I love Jodie, but she's WAY off in this one. Of all the actors of considerable skill here she is likely the most innately talented of all, yet she plays Delacourt like a bad Bond villain complete with an odious and distracting accent that sounds like Marion Cotillard by way of Christopher Lambert, a pseudo-French-meets-Swedish mouth of marbles

that left me feeling like she was harvesting outtakes for her lifetime achievement gag reel.

Matt Damon as Max is a well-balanced bag of manic hot and stone cold, at once aggressive, stoic, reckless, needy, warm, punchy, sincere and selfless. I predict fifty years from now Damon will be remembered if nothing else than for that odd, endearing quality where his professionalism and good work ethic somehow transfers intangibly to his characters, as if the common voice of his soul somehow brokers a connection from reality to make-believe in an indefinable but enviable way.

If Damon has any competition in the 'God-I-love-this-job' department it's from Sharito Copley, the angular, versatile South African who played the unassuming van de Merwe in District 9. In what could conservatively be called a 'departure' from that dull-as-dishwater bureaucrat, here he plays an Elysium sleeper agent on the payroll of Delacourt who for reasons known only to himself is pathologically, tinfoil-hat insane. He acts as the more tangible, physical villain, a Darth Vader to Foster's Emperor, vengefully pursuing Max well beyond the call of duty for no other reason than he's pissed off, bored, and delights in copious violence. As a function of the script his role is pretty standard stuff, but Copley plays it with such gleeful, fuck-you abandon it's impossible not to feed off his energy.

Speaking of violence, there is brutality to spare in Elysium, and, like the CGI, is incorporated into the action with such seamless aplomb it feels like an uncensored war documentary rather than a sci-fi film. The promotional material and trailers made a huge deal out of Max's mechanized exo-skeleton; while it serves as a cool excuse to ratchet up the brawls and inject some giddy space-age toys into the story, it is not as well-utilized as the bio-mech war suit in District 9. Advanced technology is given the same cockeyed treatment here as we've seen in some other sci-fi that goes for an air of realism: there are railguns, but they overheat and break easily; there are personal force fields but they overheat and break easily. And I think the art direction folks have been spending some time researching robots on YouTube, as the enforcer droids who harry Max and his gang look an awful lot like autonomous humanoid mechs currently being developed by DARPA.

The fights, regrettably, are close and confusing with too many similar enemies on screen doing too much at the same time; before the eye can orient to the action the scene jumps and changes focus, leaving you with a touch of the epilepsy, but it does serve to convey the brutality and desperation of the conflict. The one time Blomkamp switches to slo-mo he drops out of it again almost immediately, as if he tried it but didn't like it. I'm glad.

Quibbles aside, Elysium's greatest strength is the believability of its world; the – I've used the word once already, but it's a spectacular word, so I'll use it again – verisimilitude of things; the illusion of reality. The script chose not to dwell on 'how it all came to this', nor did the characters bemoan their Earthly anguish as if they had a frame of reference to a kinder, gentler past, thereby beating us over the head with the cleverness of their scripted torments. Instead we get a world that feels already nicely broken in, the starch and safety pins long since removed, the receipt at the bottom of the garbage bag. We're told 'this is the way of things', and it is so.

Science fiction on the screen always works best when each element, from the writing to the acting to the visuals and even the sound and the music, harmonizes with the Alpha ingredient, the setting – time and place, pure and simple. This is important to remember because, unlike other genres, it is in sci-fi that time and place are invariably alien, whether it's the distant future or a new planet, an alternate reality or a Wookie's wet dream (imagine that if you dare), setting must plead for understanding from us as an audience; it is the thing that has to work the hardest to dispel our doubts and convince us we're going someplace we might actually want to be. Elysium understood this going in, and it did a good job of laying out a convincing subterfuge for us to enjoy. When the dust settles – Hell, if it ever does – you'll be glad you went.