Right, so Elysium was not worth seeing in theatres. I’d dl this one, maybe. Using District 9 as a rubric- Blomkamp’s previous offering- Elysium fell immensely short on a number of points. I really enjoyed District 9’s gritty combination of human-interest drama, social commentary, and science-fiction action. Blomkamp attempted to repeat the formula here and it just didn’t come together. This movie comes off as a mix-mash of Escape from New York and Total Recall. Things I liked: the OST- a decent combination of original music (by new-comer Ryan Amon doing his best Hans Zimmer + Lisa Gerrard covers) with some Beethoven thrown in for good measure. One or two fairly decent character building scenes. And I mean, literally, one or two. Which is the other thing I liked about this movie: it was short- at 1 hour 50 minutes its refreshingly manageable over these 2 hour + marathons people apparently expect these days.
The movie is in essence a critique of the American health-care system. The story revolves around a blue-collar labourer from LA, Max (Damon) poisoned by lethal levels of radiation during a work-accident. He then attempts to 1) receive health care onElysium and 2) seek revenge against the system that poisoned him. He’s assisted by some post-cyberpunk hacktivists and his childhood crush Frey (Braga), who each have respective agendas, namely to destroy the Patrician/Plebeian system separating the denizens of Earth from the citizens of the 1% on Elysium; and to save her daughter from blood cancer, respectively.
These characters are opposed by Kruger (Copley- notably seen previously as Wilkus in District 9 and one of the scientists who gets offed in Europa Report), and the Elysium Secretary of Defence (Foster). Kruger, an Earth-bound ex-military operator and his buddies plan to take over Elysium for some reason thats not very clear, and so does the Sec. Def for reasons of wanting missile defence apparently (for some reason Elysium, the most expensive project ever attempted by man is completely undefended except for Kruger).
So, there’s some initial character establishment and scene-setting: this is where Blomkamp is in his element and, once again, the first 30 minutes is solid movie making. Taking a page from Verhoven’s Total Recall Blomkamp establishes the post-industrial nightmare that is 22nd century life, and the harsh divide separating the 1% and the rest. William Fichtner (legendary character actor from about a thousand movies) has a nice bit role here as a foil of a corporate CEO (Damon works for a company called Armadyne- no doubt a play on Terminator’s Cyberdyne- that manufactures Blomkamp robots)
There are some other Total Recall tributes, for example, the “Parole Officer” Max sees is throw back to the Auto-cab drivers from the latter film, and so on. Max is setting up to see his GF Frey when he gets terminally irradiated and that gets the plot proper underway.
The rest of the movie is a series of set-pieces involving 1) Max getting a military exo-skeleton, 2) Max doing a job to hijack data from the Armadyne CEO, 3) Max and Kruger fighting round one, leading to 4) Max hiding with Frey where there is a nice scene between Max and Frey’s kid which is probably the best scene in the movie, which leads to 5) Frey and the Kid getting captured by Kruger 6) Max allows himself to be captured to save them …. and you can see that this story basically writes itself.
Eventually they all end up on Elysium, Kruger kills Jodie Foster then gets into his exo-skeleton for the boss-fight with Max and then after defeating Kruger, Max transmits the code they jacked from William Fichtner that turns everyone on Earth into anElysium citizen and then everyone gets Obamacare the end.
So, as you can see, the movie is interesting for about a half hour or so and after that there is like one scene that made me vaguely feel something.
For a movie that otherwise relies entirely on “style” there is way way to much shaky cam which effectively ruins the special effects. Whereas District 9 played it’s actions sequences fairly straight with some nice “first person” cuts and nifty Alien weapon effects, Elysium relies entirely upon shakey cam bullshit which means you can’t really see what’s happening. Otherwise it basically looked like a video-game.
To sum up:
Good points:
Good setup, interesting premise for a movie
Solid, breakout soundtrack by a new-comer.
Some decent bit-character acting.
Short.
Bad points:
Predictable boring plot
No character development
Unwatchable shakey-cam
Missed Opportunities (a new section, where I sympathize with the director who probably had to change the story or something for mainstream movie people):
– Character interactions. This movie had some solid potential for some great scenes, for example, between the 1% space people and Max/the other Hacktivists, more development of Max’s relationship with his earth buddies, some kind of love-story arc with Frey, more political intrigue amongst the Elysium “council” etc
– Action. For a movie that is basically an excuse to have two guys in exo-skeletons battling each-other Blomkamp just really blew it. If you’re going to make an action movie with highly choreographed fight scenes and 400 fps bullet-time and shit don’t have the camera shaking everywhere worse than in Transformers 2.
– Ending: mixed bag. Max dies but he saves everybody. Could have ended much better with Max as an anti-hero, or something. For Max to be a believable hero he needed way more character building than he got. He has about 5 minutes of flashbacks as a kid and all we know about the guy is that he’s an ex-con blue collar worker on parole who had a shitty day and got irradiated.
Verdict:
Watch the trailer and you’ve seen the whole movie.
OP August 2013
Alexander's Movie Reviews 