Beameth me up
No one can know what the distant future has in store but the odds are it won't include Leonard Cohen, pay phones and last season's Armani. So how can Hollywood, of all industries, be so out of the time loop, asks Joe Queenan
Immediately after executing yet another monstrous act of unspeakable violence, Sharlto Copley, who plays the villain in new sci-fi thriller Elysium, says: “That’s what I’m talking about.”
It is the year 2154, yet the sadistic mercenary makes use of an expression that first appeared in a Depression-era Fats Waller ditty and enjoyed a certain vogue in the United States at the dawn of the current millennium, but is now, in 2013, no longer heard that often.
Is this a deliberately ironic use of a retro, anachronistic Americanism by a snarky South African scumbag, tantamount to some wiseacre in 2013 reaching back more than a century and exhuming the expression, “I’ll have your guts for garters”?
Or “Aye, that’ll fetch thee a pretty penny.” Or even “Avast, ye lubber lot!” Or is this simply a case of the screenwriter taking the rest of the afternoon off and not even trying to make the dialogue sound like something you would hear 141 years in the future because he figured nobody would be paying all that much attention anyway?
It is the sort of question that has flummoxed mankind since the beginning of time.
Elysium, a deceptively pretentious, not especially good film where a lot of stuff gets blown up, posits a world in which a tiny group of wealthy people live on a fabulous space station fully visible from Earth while everyone on the planet lives in squalor and misery. The symbolism is about as subtle as dysentery. One annoying feature of the film – other than the prepubescent metaphors – is that, more than a century into the future, the characters talk like people from the early 21st century, dress like people from the early 21st century, sport tattoos like people from the early 21st century and wear cobalt trouser suits like people from … 1987.