Film Review: Elysium (2013) - Jodie Foster as Hannibal the Cannibal?

Elysium (2013)
109 min  -  Action | Drama | Sci-Fi  -  9 August 2013 (USA)
Tagline: In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth. A man takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds.
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Stars: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley

Film Review: Elysium (2013) - Jodie Foster as Hannibal the Cannibal?

In her recent Elysium performance, does Jodie Foster take on the persona of her Silence of the Lambs nemesis?

Now, before hoards of angry Foster groupies break into street riots, rest assured that this assertion is not a disparagement of her acting ability. In fact, Foster is totally believable in the character she’s playing – Elysium’s tough defense secretary who does what it takes to protect humanity’s rich minority from the rest of us.

Why the comparison to Dr. Hannibal Lecter?

First of all, unlike her past roles as an underdog, protagonist, or victim, here Jodie Foster plays the bad guy. And not just any bad guy, but someone who stands out from the evil crowd in both IQ and panache.

Second, her acting in Elysium hints that, to prepare for it, she watched Silence of the Lambs – not to check on her own performance, but to learn from the master menace of cool psychopathy. Foster (as Defense Secretary Rhodes) is cool, confident, smart, and educated (she even speaks French!). She issues orders to terminate the innocent while manipulating everyone and staying ahead of her opponents, who are weakened by human conscience and tedious handwringing.

Third, while Foster’s murderous actions do not include cooking her victims, her malevolence is no less. In Silence of the Lambs, we never saw actual flesh-eating by Dr. Lecter, yet we believed it through the clever plotting and magical acting. Foster reenacts this cultured-brutality in a feminine version of stylish civility, allowing her to eliminate, clean up or dispose of targets without using harsh words or showing even the slightest increase in pulse.

Fourth, Elysium uses Foster to scare us on another level altogether. While the movie delivers a truly enjoyable science fiction thrill with a striking visual world and wonderful acting, it achieves much more than that. Without hitting viewers over the head, Elysium tackles a timely social ticking bomb: The growing gap between the few haves and the multitudes of have-nots.

Showing us where this gap, if it continues to widen, will take us, writer-director-producer Neill Blomkamp artfully weaves into Elysium the social disparities of today in food supplies, healthcare availability, citizenship rights, personal safety, and child wellbeing. The difference between today's world and the future world of Elysium is that the gated communities have all relocated to a highly sophisticated space-based habitat that’s visible yet unreachable from Earth.

That habitat, Elysium, also serves as the seat of government. Unlike our current political leaders, the Elysium government no longer pretends to serve everyone. It shamelessly cradles the tiny rich minority while suppressing the multitudes of the working poor, left back on a ravaged Earth. An all-knowing system of police forces (using robots, of course) restrains the population, while sophisticated space weapons eliminate anyone trying to reach the idyllic cocoon in which the rich live.

In summary: With Foster as a Dr. Lecter protégé, Matt Damon as the ultimate hero, and Alice Braga, Sharito Copely and Wagner Moura in supporting roles, Elysium delivers a highly enjoyable science-fiction thriller with all the goodies we’ve come to expect: Believable characters, fierce human conflict, wondrous technology, intense non-stop action, surprising plot-twists and setbacks, a phenomenal climax, and a heartbreaking-yet-satisfying resolution. But as any schoolteacher knows, a great story is the best way to dramatize a civic lesson, which is how Elysium delivers its underlying, thought-provoking and scary social message. Or, to quote another great movie, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

Avraham Azrieli writes novels and screenplays. His latest novel is Thump. www.AzrieliBooks.com

Film Review: The Gatekeepers (2013) - A Documentary of Israeli Secret Service Chiefs

The Gatekeepers (2012)
101 min  -  Documentary  -  19 June 2013 (Belgium)
Tagline: A documentary featuring interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets.
Director: Dror Moreh
Stars: Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, Avi Dichter, Carmi Gillon,Yaakov Peri, Avraham Shalom


Film Review: The Gatekeepers (2013) - A Documentary of Israeli Secret Service Chiefs

Having written several novels involving the Israeli secret services, I found “The Gatekeepers” irresistibly interesting as it contains interviews with key Israeli spy figures. However, while this movie purports to be a documentary, its clever editing, designed to support its heavy-handed political theme, makes it less faithful to historic facts than many novels.

The Gatekeepers is a documentary consisting mostly of short clips from long interviews with six former chiefs of the Israeli domestic security agency (“Shin Bet”) (the equivalent to the FBI in the United States). In between, there are short snippets of video footage, mixing real historic material with dramatized clips of unexplained origin.

In its essence, The Gatekeepers is a well-done yet lengthy political ad for the position that Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza is the reason for lack of peace in the Middle East. Many of the interview clips seem to have been cut by the movie editor and taken out of context in order to support this central political theme.

The weakness in this “blame it on the occupation” concept, obviously, is its contradiction of historic facts: The Arab war on the Jews in Palestine started a century ago, long before Israel was even established (in 1948), which was two decades before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza (in 1967). (My novel, The Jerusalem Inception, chronicles the dramatic events leading to that war, known as the Six Days War.)

Current events don’t help this theory either: Israel has long ago handed over Gaza and most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, who not only have continued to fight Israel, but have since commenced a lengthy war with each other, pitting Hamas against Fatah in a sad mirror of the wider, tragic conflicts between secularists and Islamists, as well as Sunni and Shia believers.

Furthermore, the constant state of war in the greater Middle East, currently flaring up in Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, also proves the irrelevance of this minor “occupation” to the greater Mideast perpetual state of war.

An excellent review of this movie, which addresses these issues, appears in The Jerusalem Post at:

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-dishonesty-of-The-Gatekeepers 

Avraham Azrieli writes novels and screenplays. www.AzrieliBooks.com