Elysium

Have you ever briefly dated or hooked up with someone and then immediately dismissed them because of something minor? Then one day, due to a lack of options, you find yourself sending them booty texts at 3 in the morning or liking every picture they post of themselves on Facebook? Come on, I know I’m not the only pseudo creeper out there! You rarely get a second chance and when you do, you realize that they’re actually better than what you remembered; but for some reason that minor wackness keeps on popping back up. Well the same applies to movies and their directors. I didn’t like District 9 at all when it first came out because I thought it was just an average sci-fi film that got way too much hype. Well just like the girl with the huge rack that had a bit of a lisp, I let the hype distract me from what was really important, the movie itself! So a few years later, due to the lack of good sci-fi that was out, I found myself going back to what I know and I decided to Netflix District 9 to give it another shot.  After seeing it again, I really liked it; the action was good as was the underlying theme of the movie. However, I still felt like there was something missing from it that would have made it great! Damn you Neil Blomkamp for answering my 3 am text!!!

Well with the release of Elysium, Blomkamp and I were essentially on our third date. I went in determined to not let the hype get to me and I was just going to enjoy the film for what it was. After seeing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that he is a lot like Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly; he is really talented director who has brilliant ideas for movies, it’s just that he would be better suited letting someone else actually write the screenplay for him. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like there’s a ton of bad dialogue or glaring plot holes, its just that you are never really given the opportunity to make an emotional connection with the characters. Sure there’s a sick kid that’s thrown in there and you may care about Matt Damon or Alice Braga because their attractive but there’s simply not enough interaction between them or insight into their lives to make you truly care whether they live or die. Now in Blomkamp’s defense, the movie did seem like it was rushed at times; almost making you think that there was pressure from the studio execs to keep this under 2 hours. But when your first major film is nominated for Best Picture, you really should throw your weight around a bit and get what you want.If it takes you 2 1/2 hours to properly tall a story, then dammit take 2 1/2 hours to tell it! 

The story is about Earth in the year 2154; and in this world there are the haves and the have nots. The haves live on a giant man made satellite planet called Elysium. On Elysium, there are no poor and they all have machines that can cure every disease, sickness, or injury known to man. The have nots are stuck on Earth and it’s an overpopulated, diseased riddled, third world mess where every man fends for himself. Matt Damon is an ex con who grew up in an orphanage with Alice Braga. They once again meet when Damon is injured by one of the heartless robot policemen. They plan on meeting to catch up and rekindle what they had when they were kids but their plans change when Damon is over exposed to radiation at his factory. He is given 5 days to live and the only way he can save his life is to take on the seemingly impossible mission of stealing information from one of Elysium’s elite, his former boss John Carlyle, in an attempt to bring equality between the two worlds.  So in order to preserve their way of life, Elysium’s security director Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and her main military muscle Kruger (Sharlto Copley) go all out in an attempt to capture and kill Matt Damon.

As you can see, the story itself isn’t bad, its just the execution of it is. There is one scene in which Braga’s kid tries to tell Damon a story, this is at a critical time where they desperately need for him to care about her sickness and to take her to Elysium to save her life, but it’s like they were only allotted so much time for the scene, so every word was spit out like rapid fire and you could barely understand what was being said. And when you could understand what people were saying, you had to listen to Jodie Foster and the stupid distracting accent she chose for this role. Now I will say that the action is pretty good in this film; you cant really beat exploding heads or guns that blow robots to pieces with one shot. The character Kruger is insane and Copley does an adequate job of making him a respectable villain. And Matt Damon with his acting chops alone keeps this from being a B movie. There’s just that connection element that is missing and that is why I’m barely giving this film a rating of FRESH. And I don’t feel good about that rating at all.  It’s like right when you’re about to climax, the girl with the big boobs and the lisp starts talking and it totally ruins everything! It was still sex but man it could’ve been better.