For anyone who liked District 9 more than Elysium, I happily invite you to go ahead and rewatch District 9. It’s an absolutely fantastic film, probably better than Elysium by any rubric. Those who found Elysium and District 9 too similar, I would say…go rewatch District 9, because it’s seriously such an awesome movie that I can’t say enough good things about, but also because the similarities between the two are mostly superficial. The former criticism I find weak because bemoaning the fact that a particular work isn’t as good as a filmmaker’s previous work is unhelpful and usually banal and a giveaway that the critic’s expectations greatly hindered his or her assessment of a new piece of work; the latter I find boring because it’s easy to identify similarities between an artist’s series of works and more difficult and rewarding and exciting to identify the areas in which they’ve developed, grown, improved, built upon and discovered for themselves.
In the case of Elysium, it’s a movie of a completely different tone and scope compared to District 9. Although the action centers on Los Angeles, there is a far greater sense that the struggle carries implications for the entire Earth, making it a global scale fight. Furthermore, in the service of whatever social themes one wants to draw from each film, it’s far easier to stomach aliens treating humans like animals compared to the apathy and malice that causes the same kind of treatment by the Elysians. Add to this that Matt Damon’s Max character undergoes a wonderfully subtle transformation compared to Wikus in District 9; he basically remains the same person throughout until the very conclusion, his last moment in fact. While I, too, would like to see Blomkamp explore some newer territory, dismissing his films as too similar misses out on some fascinating differences.
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