Characters / Elysium

Earth

Max DaCosta

Played By: Matt Damon, Maxwell Perry Cotton (young)

• Clingy Costume: Well, Spider's men did screw and bolt down the Powered Armor onto his body.
• Determinator: With only five days to live he is going to get up to Elysium no matter what.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Max is a physically fit man but when he's crippled in a radiation accident, his criminal contact grafts an exoskeleton onto his body that makes him able to fight on the level of the powerful police droids.
• Face Death with Dignity: Max does, giving his life so everyone else can live.
• Handicapped Badass: He also suffers from radiation poisoning during much of the film, yet still manages to defeat several of the bad guys.
• Hesitant Sacrifice: Throughout the film, Max asserts that he wants to live and make it to Elysium, fearing death whenever it looks bleak for him. He's even willing to hand over the reboot program to Kruger as long as he gets cured. At the end however he simply accepts that he has to die to upload the program to allow Earth refugees to access Elysium technology and dies.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Though he was dying anyway, he does spend his last days fighting to make everyone capable of accessing Elysium, at least until they can reboot the old system.
• Limited Wardrobe: Because they bolted the exoskeleton to him through his clothes
• Messianic Archetype: Max has plenty of parallels to Christ:
  • He may not be a carpenter, but he is a lowly factory worker.
  • His body is literally pierced by metal when he has the exosuit welded to him, leaving him with bleeding stigmata. He is also stabbed in the chest by a soldier at one point, much like Christ and the Lance.
  • Much as Christ kept the company of prostitutes and sinners, so Max keeps the company of people considered to be the dregs of society—in this case, thieves and gangsters.
  • In a way, he heals the sick.He ensures that Frey's daughter is cured of her cancer and his sacrifice causes medical shuttles to be sent down to the surface to start curing others.
• Reformed Criminal: Max was a former car thief who gave up his illegal life to work on an assembly line and earn the money he needed to make it to Elysium legitimately. When he's infected with radiation poisoning it forces him to do One Last Job for his former boss.
• Working-Class Hero: He is seen going to work in a factory as a line worker in the first part of the film.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Due to getting a lethal dose of radiation, he's expected to only live about another five days at most.

Frey Santiago

Played By: Alice Braga

• Childhood Friend Romance: With Max.
• Damsel in Distress: Becomes one after Kruger traces Max's movements back to her house.
• Flat Character: Basically, she is this. She was Max’s childhood friend and is now a nurse who desperately wants to save her daughter and...that’s kind of it.
• The Medic: Works as a nurse and patches up Max after he is seriously injured by Kruger.

Matilda Santiago

Played By: Emma Tremblay

• Children Are Innocent: Interestingly enough, even Kruger acts somewhat nice towards her, such as when he tells her to close her eyes so she doesn't see him punch Frey during an interrogation.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: She has advanced leukemia, and cannot be cured on Earth due to lacking the medical equipment readily available on Elysium.

M. Kruger

Played By: Sharlto Copley

• Amoral Afrikaner: You'd better believe it, boytjie. Though it's not mentioned in dialogue, the accent, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it flag painted on his dropship, and the fact that the song he sings to Frey's daughter is in Afrikaans confirm that he's this.
• Ax-Crazy: Even his own men who are violent thugs fear him if he's in a ticked mood. After his face is blown off, he goes from crazy to megalomaniacal, deciding to take over Elysium. He's even unhinged enough to attempt to take down Max with him in their Final Battle. According to his CCB profile, Kruger suffers from schizophrenia, paranoia, antisocial personality, dependent personality, histrionic personality, and anger management issues, in addition to psychopathy, pyromania, and narcissistic personality disorder. Frankly, it's a wonder he's able to function as well as he does.
• Bad Boss: While he seems amiable enough with his two henchmen who share his love of violence and disregard of others, he's implied to have killed other henchmen in the past on impulse and the first thing they do when he recovers from a severe injury is hold a gun at his face until he calms down.
• Beard of Evil: He is a war criminal and a complete Psycho for Hire, and he rocks a pretty thick beard.
• Blade Enthusiast: Kruger sure does love his blades, such as his Katana.
• Blood Knight: He always seems to enjoy fighting and killing people.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Kruger make use of the "F" word in practically all of his sentences. Imagine a massive drop of F-Cluster bombs.
• Cool Sword: His signature Katana.
• Corporate Samurai: A particularly nasty example.
• Cyborg: As seen on his face, and apparently more of an extensive internal arrangement, as well.
• Dragon-in-Chief: To Delacourt, she has no hope of recovering her stolen data without relying on Kruger, even when the Elysium council advises against due to his unstable personality. He even seems to be a massive part of her defense plan for Elysium since he's the one who shoots down the immigrant space ships attempting to enter. As soon as Delacourt attempts to reprimand him for his actions, he kills her to pursue Max himself.
• Empowered Badass Normal: Later gains a suit of power armour to match Max's.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Subverted. As he's molesting and interrogating Frey, he doesn't want her daughter to view his atrocities, but it's not like she can't hear her getting beaten. Later he claims he was willing to cure her but is perfectly willing to let her die with no remorse as an act of spite.
• Evil Is Hammy: His dialogue seems to chew the scenery a little.
• Facial Horror: Takes a grenade to the face and basically ends up with a hole where any facial features should be. Luckily for him, Elysium's med bays are able to fix this, though he arguably comes out of it more angry than ever.
• Faux Affably Evil: The polite demeanour is obviously an act. His tendency to tell people to get their injuries that he just inflicted on them checked out also add to this.
• The Heavy: Delacourt is physically removed from Earth so Krugar does most of the fighting on her behalf.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Takes a creepy interest in Frey saying she's the kind of woman he could imagine settling down with. Given that he beats her and has prior rape convictions, it's clear that becoming his wife would not be pleasant for anyone.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: He tries to kill Max with a grenade... unfortunately, all that he could kill with it was himself.
• Karmic Death: Kruger has a tendency love blowing things up. In the end, he gets blown up with a grenade he intended for him and Max to die with.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Favours a katana as his melee weapon and uses it quite effectively throughout the film.
• Manly Facial Hair: One inspired by South-African troops during the 70's staying out in the bush for months at a time.
  • Since Kruger was born in 1970, he would've more than likely have served in the South African Defense Force, and seeing as he's referred as being Ex-Special Forces, he might have served in the 32 Battalion, who were South African Special Forces - meaning that he would've spent time in the bush, like many of the elite members of the 32 Battalion have done. Him having the beard makes even more sense with his character's background. Also, it says almost all about Blomkamp's opinion on apartheid-era war veterans.
• Obviously Evil: He's already described as committing numerous human rights violations.
• Older Than He Looks: Per his CCB profile, Kruger was born in 1970 and began working for the CCP in 2042, at the ripe old age of 72. Interestingly, his criminal record doesn't begin until 2126.
• Psycho for Hire: The man Delacourt calls when she wants someone dead.
• Taking You with Me: He gets a Grenade Tag in his Final Battle with Max, so he attaches a carabiner to Max's exoskeleton so they will both die. Fortunately Max breaks off that part and Railing Kills Kruger.
• The Sociopath: Completely horrifying in his casual love for violence, Faux Affably Evil, a known rapist, and he wishes to take over Elysium and turn it into his own personal Hell on Earth... yeah, he fits this.
• The Starscream: Kruger is a violent and untrustworthy man, so him killing Delacourt and taking over Elysium comes as no surprise.
• Verbal Tic: He has a tendency to call Max "boytjie" (pronounced "boy-key", it's Afrikaans slang meaning "little boy").

Spider

Played By: Wagner Moura

• Big Good: About the closest thing we have to one in this movie. While he is technically a criminal, he does abandon his original plan of hijacking Carlyle's brain and using the information to steal the latter's money and resources. Instead he uses what Max downloaded from Carlyle to help out all of the citizens on Earth.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Not at the same level as Kruger, but yes, he do swear a lot.
• Genius Cripple: He walks with a limp and has to carry around a walking stick. He is also a brilliant hacker.
• Good Is Not Nice: For all his noble intentions, he still did things like human trafficking and grand theft auto.

• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a crime boss, making money out of the desperate... And the moment he has the power to take over Elysium, he instead uses it to really help out the desperate.
• Non-Action Guy: Justified in that he's walking with a limp, and he's got plenty of guys who do the fighting for him, such as Max. He does tackle Kruger at one point to save Max, but it gets him a knife stabbed into his hand as a result.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He orders his men to back down from Max, and they comply. He even gives him some Powered Armor to help him with his mission, and later becomes key to helping out everyone on Earth.

Drake and Crowe

Played By: Brandon Auret (Drake) and Josh Blacker (Crowe)

• Amoral Afrikaner: Like their boss— they've got the same accents and same brutal attitude.
• Badass Normal: They do not have the gadgets of their boss or the strength of Max's exo-suit but still remain major threats.

• Bantering Baddie Buddies: They're rarely seen apart.
• Elite Mook: They are capable of wiping out the Elysium security forces all by their lonesome.
• Psycho for Hire: Just like their boss.

Julio

Played By: Diego Luna

• Heroic Sacrifice: He distracts Kruger long enough to prevent the latter from killing Max. Unfortunately he ends up dying in the process.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Kruger stabs him in the chest with his katana.

Elysium

Secretary of Defense Jessica Delacourt

Played By: Jodie Foster

• Alas, Poor Villain: when Kruger brutally slits her throat, you can’t help but feel for her as she painfully bleeds out on the floor.
• Big Bad: Depending on your idea of "bad". The powerful authority figure behind Kruger.
• The Beautiful Elite: Played by Jodie Foster. Very pretty. Rare example of a workaholic Knight Templar being part of The Beautiful Elite, instead of decadent dilletantes.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Her reasoning for acting the way she does is to keep the safety of the people of Elysium, no matter how brutal her methods seem. She even reminds Patel of this, and when people certainly do break into Elysium later, she points out that she, literally, "told you so".
• Iron Lady: A highly lethal example of this.
• Non-Action Big Bad: Throughout the entire film, she uses Kruger as a mercenary to deal the violence needed for her work.

• Smug Snake: She has absolutely no problem acting as the leader of Elysium security and the goal to keep the station safe makes her even more important than anybody else living there, while she also holds, as part of that job, the idea that any Elysium resident is important above any Earth resident.
• Think of the Children!: Her explanation for why she was hired. She cites the need to protect Elysium's children as why she is willing to take such lengths.
  Delacourt: "Do you have children, President Patel?"
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Her plan to reboot Elysium's computers with Carlyle's code, appoint herself as President after the reboot, and use her new authority to increase the harshness against immigrants by a greater percentage (even giving Carlyle's company an exclusivity contract to manufacture weapons for their defense for the next 200 years). Would have been this... except that the plot conspires to keep her from executing the plan as she desires. Mostly by giving her a bad case of Death-By-Bullying the Dragon.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: When the shuttle she authorized to land crashes on Elysium thanks to her off-the-books and illegal The Dragon, she doesn't miss a beat in feigning ignorance and blaming the entire incident on the President's more humane policies and then seizing control of the security forces in her capacity as War Secretary. It would have been more impressive if her next act had not been Bullying the Dragon.

John Carlyle

Played By: William Fichtner

• Child Prodigy: According to All There in the Manual.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Armadyne's profit-driven CEO, who is willing to let his employees die on the job and even assist a coup on his government if it means securing a contract.
• Deadpan Snarker: When Max's group shoot his shuttle down and surround the ship, he responds to the ship's voice system telling him he's unharmed by sarcastically remarking how comforting that is.
• Evil Genius: To Delacourt, for whom he scripts the program to snatch control of Elysium from Patel.
• Jerkass: He shows more concern for a bedsheet being kept clean than a employee dying from radiation poisoning.
• Living MacGuffin: He's the first person to carry the code that will reboot Elysium's computers in his brain.
• Neural Implanting: The implaints that allow him to carry computer code in his brain.

President Patel

Played By: Faran Tahir

• Anti-Villain: While living on Elysium doesn't earn him any points with people on Earth, he's also not actively making their life more difficult either the way Delacourt and Kruger seem to want to do.
• Clueless Boss: His Secretary of Defense is let her off with an apparent one last chance, letting her know that she's on thin ice before firing her primary agent. He doesn't advise her about stricter protocols, or put her under more scrutiny, instead letting her start a plot for a coup and rehire her Psycho for Hire merc. Later, his own policies are used against him to let Delacourt run circles around him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He reprimands Delacourt that authorised shuttles were meant to be handled 'quietly,' rather than very publicly shot in plain view. He's also very disturbed by Kruger's instability.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Technically, although he's the least evil of the film's villains, he is still at the top of the tyrannical system.
• President Evil: He heads a corrupt, oligarchic, techno-dystopian government with almost-Orwellian surveillance abilities. Making things worse, he keeps the miraculous medbay technology out of the hands of the Earth-citizenry for no clear reason, perhaps beyond making sure the dystopia stays that way. Besides a potential high up-front cost, the medbays can cure anything, in seconds, with no apparent expenditure of resources or labor. While life would still be uncomfortable on the pollution-ravaged and desertified Earth, there's no reason he couldn't have made life much easier by setting up medbay clinics across the planet.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He specifically chews out Delacourt for shooting down the civilian craft attempting to land on Elysium, and revokes Kruger's military status shortly after said incident after pointing out that he's a war criminal and unstable maniac.

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