Elysium Movie Review
Not really District 9. More like District 3.
Once again I must apologize for not getting this done sooner, or not posting at all for like a week. I am now way behind on movies and will try to get at least three done this weekend. I was at the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas all weekend and enjoyed it immensely. Unfortunately I was so busy selling Star Trek t-shirts I never had a chance to write it up.
That’s not entirely true. I did see this the night it opened (for the record the theater at the Palms is really nice) and probably could have ground it out one of the evenings. The fact is I was kind of disappointed by this film and just not really motivated to write this up.
This is another case of me still not learning the important lesson of never expecting movies to do anything but suck. If I had approached this film with that attitude I would have been pleased enough to give it a modest thumbs up as a relatively decent sci fi film. However the fact is I am a huge fan of District 9 and as such expected this to at least blow one of my socks off. Instead I got pretty formulaic Hollywood pap and glitz without the gritty, engaging story that made District 9 what it was.
I now believe the weight of working with major Hollywood stars and operating under the thumb of an actual Hollywood studio crushed Neill Blomkamp’s creativity and caused him to push out this very pretty and expensive by-the-numbers BM (either that or given three and a half times the budget of his first film he suddenly pulled a Lucas and thought that cool CGI makes up for lame story. God I hope not). While this film had it’s moments and were it of a lesser pedigree I might give it a pass it really didn’t feel like it was made by the same person.
I think the best way to explain my issues is to talk about what made District 9 great and how this one failed to live up to that legacy. In his first film Blomkamp took a total nobody protagonist and a sidekick that looked like a seven foot tall bipedal potato bug and managed to make us not only like but care about them both. The social issues addressed made sense and seemed like a potentially realistic approach when dealing with a mass immigration of blue color alien bugs. The villains were motivated to do what they thought was best for their society rather the just plain evil, and the denouement, while opening the door to the potential of conflict resolution, managed to avoid the Disneyfied “all must be right in the world by the end of Act III” rule that is the Black Plague of Hollywood scripts. The CGI and science fiction were tools to tell a great story and engage the audience with cool characters.
In this film the main character is the very human Matt Damon, who is motivated by the simplest and most inane of reasons to do bad, explosive things. His character develops only in the most tertiary of manners, and all of the supporting characters looked like they were created by a supercomputer designed to create the greatest stereotypes of all time. The villains seemed to be in a contest to see which of them could be the most evil for evils sake: the brutal, exploitive capitalist who treats his workers like expendable slaves (to the point that he kicks Damon out of the infirmary in order to save the cost of replacing the hospital bedding), the bitchy, callous, power hungry security director who wants to be the Hitler of space or something, and the psychopathic South African mercenary who apparently gets his rocks off killing and raping everything he comes across. It was like they all went to the Dr. Evil School of Super Villainy and graduated with comical honors. The story lacked any kind of real drama or arc (anyone else remember the slow and methodical way that Wikus Ven De Merwe changed his attitude towards the aliens even as his body changed?) and naturally since this is a big budget Hollywood film we have to pull out the inevitable MacGuffin that will save the world. Throw in a ton of unnecessary action to appease the unwashed masses and I guess we have a film.
Sigh. I will give this film props for some of the action being both believable and cool, and also for not feeling the need to explain how the science of a ring world works. I guess Blomkamp assumed we had all read Ringworld or played Halo once or twice in our lives. I guess it was pretty and the CGI flawless. If you ever wanted to see every villain from Snidely Wiplash to Khan Noonien Singh distilled into a potent evil serum and injected into three otherwise talented actors than I guess this would work for you. As a movie it’s not awful, just mundane. It’s just that I expected so much more.
SPOILER ALERT. Skip ahead a few paragraphs if this puts you off. The story starts off two hundred years in the future. The Earth is pretty much permanently screwed thanks to our pollution and overpopulation. Like all problems money is the answer, so the rich of this future have all moved to a ring world called Elysium that closely resembles a less crowded Newport Beach in orbit around the earth . Max (Matt Damon-Good Will Hunting, The Bourne Identity, Inside Job) is an ex-con trying to go straight at a dead end job manufacturing the very robot drones that are used to keep him and the rest of the population under suppression (um, could I get an extra helping of irony with my movie please?). Meanwhile, dragon lady Elysium defense director Delecourt (Jodie Foster-the Silence of the Lambs, Contact, Panic Room) has the job of shooting down ships filled with families trying to escape Earth to Elysium, a job she appears to approach with the same relish that a dingo would working as a guard dog at a pre school.
In the future they have medical tanning beds that will cure all diseases in like three seconds, but of course the super rich being intrinsically evil and selfish keep them for themselves and leave the rest of us to pound sand. Max gets his arm broken by the very robots he is building (ironic!) and while at the hospital runs into childhood friend turned hot nurse Frey (Alice Braga-I am Legend, Repo Men (no, not Repo Man. Repo Men), City of God). She has a child dying of leukemia (Emma Tremblay-no other film credits).
Max gets back to work where he is forced to enter a chamber to fix something and receives a lethal dose of radiation (OSHA apparently ended in the mid 21st century). The owner of the company John Carlyle (William Fichtner-Black Hawk Down, the Dark Knight, Contact) is a billionaire Elysium resident and all around dick. He kicks Max out of the infirmary in order to save on the laundry bill (he has nothing better to do with his time?).
Meanwhile on Elysium Delecourt is in trouble for her shoot-first-ask-no-questions approach to security. She is called to the carpet by the president (Faran Tahir-Star Trek (2009), Charlie Wilson’s War, Iron Man) and then decides the only thing she can do is stage a coup and take over entirely. She recruits Carlyle who writes a program to basically rewrite everything in the Elysium system.
Max now needs to get to Elysium in order to get cured. The only way he can do that is to do a job with local crime kingpin Spider (Wagner Moura-Elite Squad, VIPs, Romance). Spider wants to kidnap some Elysium resident and steal data from his brain, and naturally Max chooses Carlyle. In order for Max to operate in spite of the fact that he is dying they graft a powerful exoskeleton to him (the exoskeleton was pretty cool, and probably my favorite part of the movie). They get Carlyle and the data turns out to be the very program needed to completely fix the world.
At that point all hell breaks loose. Delecourt unleashes psychotic mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley-believe it or not this is the guy who played Wikus in District 9. I’m still not sure I believe it. Also the A Team, Europa Report) who uses some fairly cool high tech tracking techniques to hunt down Max. Stuff gets blown up, people get killed, and there are like five double crosses in the last ten minutes of the film.
The stars.
Most of the hard core sci fi was pretty cool. The robot police, the actual ring, the medical beds, and a lot of the technology was in the very cool category. One star. I have to give a bonus for the grafted exoskeleton. I really want one. One star. Each of the actors played their fairly one dimensional characters as well as could be expected. Someone told Sharlto to play a crazed psychopath and he ran with it. One star. Action was pretty good, and nothing in this movie strained my sense of disbelief too far. One star. CGI was flawless and used in the right proportion to actual sets and actors. One star. Total: five stars.
The black holes.
Unfortunately a lot of these are going to stem from comparisons to District 9, but I can’t stop myself. The story was extremely linear, with character motivations being delivered with all the subtlety and depth of a mackerel slapped across your face over and over again. One black hole. In spite of the fact that all the characters were human I couldn’t generate 1/4 the caring that I did for any of the Prawns. None of them drew me in and the film gave me no reason to care about them in the least. One black hole. The villains were evil for no apparent reason and by the end of the film were more comical than serious. One black hole. In spite of the coolness of the ending in D9 Blomkamp obviously caved in to the studio and came up with yet another Save the World MacGuffin for this one. One black hole. Total: four black holes.
So one star. I suppose I could have been kinder, but I have seen and been excited by the trailer for this film for months and to be this disappointed just feels crappy. If you have never seen D9 I suppose you will enjoy it, as long as you just want sci fi action. If you have a decent sized TV it’s worth seeing on DvD or NetFlix. Date movie? Meh. No reason not to bring her along but it won’t impress her. Bathroom break? Honestly nothing springs to mind. Maybe any of the scenes with Frey and her daughter. Not a lot going on there.
Thanks for reading. I will try to get some more going on soon. Now that my show season is more or less over I can concentrate on doing more of these. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have a comment on this review or the movie feel free to post them here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Have a great day.
Dave
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