I never really liked District Nine very much, so why did I see Elysidumb? To write this rotten review. Elysium isn't quite the anus of cinema, as it has a fine central premise. But it totally lost me when it came to the acting, the cinematography, and the way it beats the audience over the head with its message. It reminded me of Avatar in this way-- it has a worthy premise and underlying theme, but at the end, the theme isn't quite so much underlying as it is yelling at you right in your face.
Elysium stars Matt Damon as a poor factory worker on Earth in the future. In this dystopian society, the poor live on Earth, and the privileged live on Elysium, a gigantic satellite/habitat orbiting the planet. It is somehow able to generate an atmosphere for itself, and is completely open to the vacuum of space. Pardon me if I found this completely unbelievable. Anyway, Damon gets radiation poisoning one day on the job, and realizes that the rich people on Elysium can repair his cells with their Affordable Health Care Act-- but first he has to get there. To do this, he dons a completely ridiculous exoskeletal suit that makes him super-strong. He can only be beaten if he's thrown in a pool, at which point he would probably just sink.
Damon goes back to an old friend for help, and the friend asks a favor before he helps him out. So now he must kidnap a rich dude (Mitt Romney unfortunately turned down the role) and download his memory into his brain via a USB cord. Bull-motherfucking-shitty-shit. Anyway, after a shaky cam-laden action sequence, Damon downloads the guy's memory and gets away, only to walk right back to the bad guys in order to be taken to Elysium. After Sharlto Copley gets his face blown open, Damon and his girlfriend (and her daughter) are captured by Elysium officials and held captive while the information Damon stole is pulled out of his head. Seriously: It's fucking stupid.
Matt Damon must have a Jesus complex after this movie, because it spends a shitload of time emphasizing about how HE CAN SAVE US ALL and that he shall deliver us from the persecution of the rich and yadda yadda whatever. At the end, he makes everyone a citizen of Elysium. A fuckload of good that'll do them. That giant steering wheel in space can't possibly support very many people, and it would take years to heal everyone using the pods. Meanwhile, Earth still has a few other problems (crime, unemployment, pollution, overpopulation, famine, etc). But fuck that shit-- Blomkamp chose to tackle immigration with this film, and immigration it shall be! Write to your congressman, people! The director of District Nine know how to solve all out problems!
While the first act goes out of its way on numerous occasions to remind the audience that THE POOR ARE HEROES, THE RICH ARE EVIL, the second act eventually devolves into a cheap Iron Man knockoff. Sharlto Copley dons a similar robo-suit, and he and Damon duke it out. The camerawork here was worse than The Hunger Games, filled with blurred visuals, bad close-ups, an shaky cameras that made it very uninvolving. It's also not very imaginative-- anyone can take the health care/immigration problems of today and stick it in a sci-fi setting. Plus, Blomkamp didn't seem to want to bother making up new robots, as he basically reused the ones from District Nine. It altogether feels very recycled and not as subversive as it should be.
On to the acting-- It was ATROCIOUS. I have never been a fan of Damon, and he did nothing in this role that couldn't have been accomplished by a far lesser actor. I wouldn't be surprised if the role was originally written for Sam Worthington. All he had to do was be bald, be tough, and run around with a mech suit on beating people up. Wait... didn't he have radiation poisoning? Wasn't he, you know... weak and dying? Meanwhile, Jodie Foster was terrible as the one-dimensional and generic defense commander for Elysium. She brought absolutely nothing new to the table. Her lines were bland and stereotypical, her delivery was flat, and her entire performance basically reeked. "Get these... two... out of here." It was just lame and boring to watch. A six-year old could write that dialogue. And at the end, nothing is done with her character. Not only does Copley turn out to be the bigger villain, but she dies like a dumbass before the final action sequence had even ended. What would have been GOOD is if Damon's girlfriend had patched her up, saving her life and making her see the error in her ways, but no. There was just no character development on either of these fronts.
When Elysium isn't drilling its obvious message into your brain or showcasing banal acting, it has some really good plot points and some mediocre minor performances. But when a movie screams its intentions at you so clearly and unimaginatively, it's hard not to be a little annoyed by it. I can't get over how much Blomkamp crammed this obvious and pathetically concealed story down audience's throats. It's truly mind-boggling that no one took him aside to inform him that this wasn't a good movie. But maybe after District Nine, there was just too much pressure on him to come up with a new idea. But I guess we should have seen this coming: D9 has a pretty straightforward message as well. It's about apartheid and race relations (with aliens subbing in for black people). It fucking takes place in South Africa, for God's sake. How much more obvious can you get?
You can call Elysium's premise imaginative, but it really isn't-- It's just an obvious and one-sided take on a few social issues of today IN SPACE!!! There was little to no creativity put into the premise, characters, dialogue, story, action, camerawork, or... anything else for that matter. Final Score for Elysium: 3/10 stars. Why so generous? Well, I have a soft spot for sci-fi, and it did have a few minor redeeming parts (such as Copley playing a bounty hunter). It has some memorable scenes, including one where Copley's face is completely reconstructed, but unless you're an ardent fan of R-rated science fiction, I can't recommend this.
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