By Cathy Anderson
MATT Damon has finally become the hero he’s always wanted to be.
Sure, he kicked Treadstone to the kerb in the Bourne trilogy, uncovered conspiracies in Green Zone and led the embattled Springboks to victory in Invictus.
But as ex-con Max Da Costa, who’s on a mission to save humanity in Elysium, Damon finally goes where he’s never gone before: outer space.
‘‘I’ve been looking for a science- fiction movie, they’re just not very good, the ones that come my way,’’ Damon tells mX.
That was before he met South African director Neill Blomkamp, who wowed Hollywood in 2009 with his gritty sci-fi doco-style flick, District 9.
Although the A-lister wasn’t the first choice for the role — Ninja of South African group Die Antwoord and Eminem had turned it down — it seems Blomkamp created the perfect hero for Damon in the futuristic film, set in 2154 when the rich have escaped a resource-barren and impoverished Earth for Elysium, a doughnut-shaped refuge of tranquillity, elitism and life-altering medical technology.

‘‘I’ve been looking for a science- fiction movie, they’re just not very good, the ones that come my way,’’

Max suffers a lethal dose of radiation at the factory where he’s eking out an existence and, with only five days to live, enlists the help of kingpins from his shady past to help him reach Elysium and cure himself, which includes a powerful robotic suit hard-wired to his bones and his brain, Matrix style.
Damon says Da Costa was born almost in the same way as a comic- book hero.
‘‘I saw District 9 and I just loved it.
“I sat down with him for a cup of coffee and he pulled out this graphic novel that he’d done on his computer at home with all of these images from the film,’’ Damon says of his first meeting with Blomkamp.
‘‘And it was the world of Elysium — it was the space station, it was Earth in 2154 as a Third World planet and the images of Max and what he looked like and the exoskeleton. I’d just never seen any of it in a movie before and so I was so excited.’’
In truth, Da Costa is more of a reluctant hero.
A thieving orphaned streetkid, he dreams of escaping to the serenity of Elysium with his childhood sweetheart, Frey (Alice Braga).
Once he begins his journey to save his own life, he becomes embroiled in a mission to save Frey’s terminally ill daughter, and then, of course, everyone on Earth.
It’s the stuff of comic-book legends, but Elysium isn’t a simple action film.

‘‘The reality is if we’re comparing ourselves to the people who have it the worst on planet Earth, we’re comparing ourselves to people who are surviving on $1 or $1.50 a day.

Blomkamp’s District 9 was a breakthrough for the modern sci-fi genre with its thinly veiled portrayal of South Africa’s apartheid via an alien invasion of ‘‘prawns’’ who are subjugated on Earth.
So too, Elysium is also brimming with political subtexts: wealth inequality; universal healthcare; and, a hot election issue for Australia, immigration and ‘‘illegals’’.
Damon says he never felt as though they were making a social justice film.
‘‘Neil always said he didn’t want to make a message movie,’’ Damon says. ‘‘And I think, like District 9, when you’re dealing in allegory, you’re looking at your world in a different way and I don’t think he wanted to do much more than that.’’
However, Damon says the attraction of working with Blomkamp was because he’s ‘‘someone who could make an incredibly original, entertaining movie but also one that had a kind of a soul to it and something to say’’.

‘‘The diet was the hard part, just because I love to eat — and no beer.

As a member of Hollywood’s wealthy elite, Damon said he was well aware of the irony of playing a poor, desperate man when it could be him living in a Beverly Hills style mansion on Elysium.
‘‘We all talked about it a lot,’’ he says.
‘‘When we were in Mexico, shooting in this giant garbage dump, we would shoot there all day and then we would go back into Mexico City and we would go to a wonderful restaurant for dinner and basically go back to Elysium.
‘‘The reality is if we’re comparing ourselves to the people who have it the worst on planet Earth, we’re comparing ourselves to people who are surviving on $1 or $1.50 a day.
‘‘In that sense, all of us are living in Elysium.’’
Although an Oscar-winning screenwriter in his own right, Damon followed Blomkamp’s Elysium ‘‘bible’’ to the letter, which meant a gruelling physical transformation to be in the best shape since the Bourne franchise.
‘‘The motivation was really that graphic novel that Neill had given me,’’ he confesses.
‘‘The images in the film were so striking and great and he’d put so much work into it that once I took the part I had to come through for him.’’
Damon says working out for four hours a day over three months was ‘‘fine’’.
‘‘It’s more than I’ve ever been in a gym but it’s not a full day’s work,’’ he says.
‘‘The diet was the hard part, just because I love to eat — and no beer.
‘‘That’s really hard for me.’’

This article originally appeared in mX newspaper