Movie Title: Elysium
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Date Released: August 9th, 2013
Date Seen: August 9th, 2013
Seen in: IMAX
Seen with: Dad, Marcela
Part 1 – Spoiler Free Quickie Review
The story of the world in the future – as expected, we are over populated, running low on resources, and the rich/privileged reign supreme. The rich live on a space station orbiting Earth known as Elysium. There, everyone lives in a beautiful house, with a beautiful garden, and has a machine in their house that cures them of everything in mere seconds. A cut on your leg is nothing. Have your entire leg blown off? Whatever, we can regrow it. Have leukemia? It’ll fix it. Max (Matt Damon) lives on Earth and suffers an accident at work that will result in his death in 5 days due to radiation poisoning. This leaves him the perfect candidate for a procedure that will allow him to make it up to Elysium – and potentially saving everyone on Earth.
The acting was great, because of course Matt Damon was in it, and he’s great. He did well in the fight scenes, in the sick scenes, and in the emotional scenes. His character was also interesting – not really your typical hero, and appears to be more of an anti-hero. He used to be a car thief and is currently on probation, and it seems he has changed, but still have some strange morals. Jodie Foster plays Delacourt, the defense secretary on Elysium. Her character was good, but she had the weirdest accent ever. I don’t even know what it was supposed to be. It didn’t sound British, Australian, South African, American, or anything at all. It was a nice mix of… lord knows what. It was very special and kept pulling me out of the movie because I was so distracted by the horrible accent. The other characters in the movie were great. The only problem I had was some characters seemed to perform an action completely out of character towards the end of the movie. It was odd. There are also some plot points that don’t really make sense, but they things that are sometimes necessary for a movie. I’ll talk about them in the second part of the view. They’re mostly just things that wouldn’t make sense if this whole situation was actually going on. But, that’s not always a bad thing, because there wouldn’t have been a movie if they didn’t ignore the detail that bothered me.
The visual effects were awesome. It has the same feel of District 9 did, with the dirty, grungy, very mechanical world in the slums – which in this case, is all of Earth. They’re interesting to look at and visually pleasing. The fight scenes were great, especially with the exoskeleton made of pistons, wires, etc. It took cool fight scenes and made them even more fun. There were even a lot of fights with the robots that were pretty cool. I also loved that this movie uses gun fights, knife fights, electric fights (with sparks and shocking things), and even some explosives. It made the movie just that much more enjoyable to have a nice mix of fighting scenes, wrapped around a nice sci-fi plot.
Part 2 – In-Depth Spoiler Ridden Review
So the two characters who I think went against character were Max and Delacourt. Delacourt, I would have thought at her death she would have demanded to be saved, rather than pushing Frey away from her. Perhaps because she knew that even if she died at that moment, her brain would be ok, and she could be saved with the machine, is why she pushed Frey away and just didn’t want the pain? Who knows. It just seemed a very out of character move. Max on the other hand seemed all over the place. He clearly values his relationship with Frey, considering their past, and the tattoo we notice he has. Why he completely refuses to help Frey’s daughter, I don’t know. That seemed out of character considering his adoration of Frey. It also seemed strange then how quick he was willing to completely sacrifice himself. It was just like his character went back and forth between hero and antihero.
There was a plot detail that bothered me. At the end of the movie, the system recognizes that there are all these new found citizens, all on Earth (of course). They mobilize treatment to Earth, in the form of MULTIPLE EMS vehicles, each equipped with about 50 empty sickbed things, and robots that staff them all. Ok, all Elysium seems about is making money and furthering the rich – I don’t understand why they didn’t utilize these vehicles and available resources to help the people on Earth. Granted, I know that they’re not going to heal them for free, but you could still charge for it and make some money, and the people of Earth won’t hate you AS much. You seemingly have an endless supply of workers to build you more of these robots and sickbays, why not keep them healthy? But again, too practical thinking for a movie.
Overall: 7/10
A fun, intelligent, sci-fi movie, with good fight scenes, a decent plot, and a grungy mechanical setting that is beautiful and visually pleasing.
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