Elysium (Dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

The reviews for Elysium have been pretty positive, which I am attributing to the action sequences in the movie. However, as a sci-fi geek I thought the movie was particularly weak.

The movie opens with pure exposition- we see Max (Matt Damon) as a child falling in love with another eight year old and him expressing the desire to leave the lower class for a life of privilege, only to be reminded that life on earth is much more beautiful than that shallow, vapid world. Um… No movie needs to start with exposition like this. No movie ever! It is pure laziness. Can’t you believably show us a love story? Who cares is he has a crush on this girl at eight years old? But this history is the only desperate straw that the movie can pull to advance the plot and try to get us to feel for this couple.

Cut to Max as an adult, struggling in the working class, beat by corrupt police robots as reunited with his childhood love, whose life is too “complicated” for love right now.  And then, more corruption… which leads to Max’s life being threatened… need to get to Elysium for magic health care machine that we later learn can even restore someone whose face is literally blow off because the explosion was nice enough to leave his brain unharmed… and a crazy scheme to get brain data to access the codes of Elysium and overnight turn all into equal citizens. That’s the story, oh, and we also need to save his childhood love/ new adult love’s child who is in the final stages of leukemia but still has a nice thick full head of hair and rosy pink cheeks. Let the action begin.

A lot has already been said about the simplistic privileged and underprivileged class struggle in the movie, but I would like to add to that that while capitalism might be as corrupt as the movie portrays, it is certainly not that separate. We see shots of the beautiful Elysium which looks like that nicest areas of Los Angeles, with hot women tanning by the pool and many other people doing equally useless things, like attending snooty parties etc. And then earth, which looks like the poorest areas of Los Angeles where everyone works there ass off for nothing. Ok, but how did those rich people get all of those lovely things? We assume the same way as today, the laborers work and the rich take their profit. But when the rich, intelligent, and corrupt people live an such an ideal place, they are going to get bored. They are going to want to go to earth, even hunt people for sport, which is what Kruger, played by District 9’s Sharlto Copley, does. I would have liked to see this idea expounded upon, because none of characters were developed enough to get these ideas across. The script needed a few more rewrites before it went into production to smooth out some of the finer details, which it tends to gloss over. And because the thought was not put in originally, the characters are very weak and performances are even weaker. The acting is the worst part about the movie.

Now it is interesting that the character’s name is Max, which is most likely in reference to Mad Max. The action sequences were kind of neat because they turn people into terminators and fight shaky-cam style in desert lands. And then like Mad Max, this Max has a bit of a nihilistic attitude, since this Max must get to Elysium for magic health care or die. He is no hero, not until the plot demands that he be one.

The movie concludes with the idea that magic heath care should be available for all! Yay! Why didn’t we think of that in the first place? Man, if only life were so simple,..