Elysium (Here There Be Spoilers)

I've started this post at least a half dozen ways so far, and I think that that's indicative of the mixed feelings I have about this movie.

I did not like this movie.

At the same time, I can not wait to watch it again.

The movie looked AWESOME. The technological aspects of the science fiction seemed really well thought out and smart. The details were, across the board, engrossing and thought provoking. The acting was magnificent. The action sequences were exciting and fun.


And then the entire thing fell apart when they tried to tie it into a story.

First and foremost, the story is very blatantly (oh my god so blatantly) a series of possible mirrors of a handful of real world political arguments regarding health care, distribution of wealth, and illegal immigration. Unfortunately, when they try to incorporate these arguments into the beautiful, well acted, smart, technologically accurate(?), and detail heavy world, things start making a whole heck of a lot less sense.

This is the spot where the spoilers start.





So it's a hundred and fifty some odd years in the future. Rich people have retreated to a geosynchronous satellite colony called Elysium that floats over Los Angeles where they can spend all day swimming and having parties. Poor people live on Earth (or at least in LA) where they can be sick and miserable and build robots that will eventually pick on them.

Every Elysiumian has a magic machine in their house that makes you young and beautiful and live almost forever and cures every disease. Poor people on Earth (or at least in LA) spend a good chunk of their free time trying to sneak past the border guards and land on Elysium so that you can jump into a magic machine and be healed and beautiful again before the robots show up to tase you send you back to Los Angeles.

As far as I can tell, the rich people are only doing this because they are mean, jerk-faces.

The rich people are using the poor people to work in their robot factories to make surly/grumpy soldier and police officer and probation officer and doctor robots. They never really touch on why they're bothering to keep all these people around instead of replacing them with robots. One can only assume that it's because it's no fun to dock robot's pay and extra difficult to give them lethal doses of radiation poisoning.

Elysiumians (and their robot bullies) are themselves slaves to a codified set of laws that exists as a computer program and must, even when it's obvious that the program has been hacked and hijacked, begrudgingly follow it without question.

It's against the law to arrest a citizen of Elysium, although the penalty for a citizen committing treason is hanging?

The mean, jerk-faces planned ahead far enough that they made an armada of EMS relief ships, on the off chance that they were going to want to start being nice to the 99%.

At the same time they couldn't come up with a better defense plan to stop gate crashers than hiding crazy people on the planet with rocket launchers, and having a giant arsenal on the satellite without soldiers.

The encryption program kills you after you upload the program? How was Carlyle planning to survive?

A grenade to the face won't kill you as long as your brain is still intact and people can meander around and eventually stuff you into a magic box. Why were all those other people with intact brains still dead?




I don't know. I guess that overall, I am bothered most by the lost opportunity of this film. I think that Blomkamp is a freaking GENIUS director; I'd just love to see him paired up with a story he didn't write.

The exoskeleton punching was great. The slow-mo with a Middle Eastern woman singing was lame and overdone.

I rather disliked it. There were a few alright moments, and some pretty nice graphics. They really should have tied the views of Elysium together better: Connecting the wide view with the tight views was hard.

There was a lot of silly stuff ... to an extent that it rather bothered me, when I usually am more or less tolerant of that sort of sillyness:


Anyways,

TomB

Too preachy, too slow, too little action and the villains are too cartoony.

I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Best action sci-fi in a long time.

The compositing of the CGI is so beautiful. The artists deserve a pat on the back and a cake in the mouth. It was near seamless.

Everything was so cool. The tech, the robot throwing a no look grenade, the action, the brutality of the violence. All the little details gave the movie a complete look and feel.

I didn't think it was preachy at all. The story of a man with five days to live, in a race to find a cure in a world with great inequity. It resonates with people in the current climate. Though growing up in South Africa, Neill had seen that sort of inequity very clearly before the whole 1% vs 99% mentality became more mainstream. Everyone with means there turns their house into a fortress with electrified fences and private security patrolling the streets.

I also thought it was a little silly that they relied on human forces on the ground to provide cover for the space station. I'll chalk it up to Blomkamp needing a scene early on in the movie to introduce Sharlto Copley's character, who did an awesome job in Kruger.
As for a non-meta explanation, I can only hypothesize that Elysium isn't actually allowed to shoot people down in the same way a fancy resort in our world isn't allowed to shoot hobos on sight.

The many ambulances at the end would be more of a failsafe for if things went pearshaped on Elysium, like a sudden loss of atmosphere or a ninja solar flare or something similar.

How Max got radiation sickness was a bit contrived however. Why wouldn't there be a button to push the door open? Seems like lazy writing.

And Jodie Foster's accent was horrendous. She put on an accent you use when you want to parody posh British people.

I took the accent, along with the way that the Elysiumians spoke to each other, as a contrivance to show that the language had morphed in the intervening years.

Jodie Foster can do a range of good accents, what I think people are balking at is that it's not an accent that really exists.

Aw yeah, I'm not calling Jodie Foster's acting chops into question. I think she's superb. But I just cringed when she spoke the way she did.

I just read that Neill wanted Eminem to play Max but Eminem's desire to film it in Detroit didn't work for the producers. I think casting him would have been a poor choice.

I'm pretty sure Carlyle didn't plan on killing himself. The protection could probably be lifted with a password or some reprogramming. He is a master hacker after all.

Does anyone know whose face it is on the med bays? Is it Roman goddess or other mythological being?

Also, I wonder how much faster you can go or how much more explosive you can be with an exoskeleton. I imagine your muscles and ligaments will still have to endure a great deal of stress if you move too fast. Any experts on the matter?

Finally saw it (seemed like an appropriate activity for Labor Day). I enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as District 9. It seemed to me more trite and predictable; for all the hullabaloo going on the story and its conclusion were fairly basic. I think it was a nice way to make a movie about inequalities in rights and opportunities. I also saw a lot of logic gaps that I agree with some other people on. However, two meta-level things bothered me.

It seems incredibly ironic that in this movie about haves and have-nots, the have-not antihero was played by an A-list Hollywood actor. I was interested to learn that they tried a South African rapper first for the part. And don't get me wrong, Matt Damon is a great actor and did everything well, but it's hard to forget that he's Matt Damon, and as down-to-earth as he can be, his status kind of undercuts the point. Some unknown guy would have worked better in that level. On that note, Sharlto Copley is an amazing actor; he was a lot of what made District 9 work and he's done some very different roles since.

Also, I was disappointed with the glibness with which the medical aspect was approached. The movie ends up conflating "everyone being equal" with "everyone having everything". In the real world, healthcare disparities are an enormous problem, but there are some illnesses that money can't cure. Look at Steve Jobs; he was definitely in the "have" category but he couldn't beat cancer. There are innumerable other examples of rich, powerful people who died of incurable illnesses. Any South African knows the story about how a superstar disabled person living in a gated community shot another rich and famous person, so life is not all great in there. Even in Star Trek, where technology is magic and medicine can cure just about anything, terminal illness and incurable disability are recurring themes (Pike in a wheelchair, Bendii Syndrome, Irumodic Syndrome, etc.). To suggest that the rich people had beds in their houses that could cure cancer and undo radiation sickness and rebuild faces and were routinely leaving them unused feels intellectually dishonest to me. The robots dispatched at a moment's notice to heal all the world's ills are too easy of an ending. There are innumerable real examples of care behind withheld or denied and many people die from preventable things, but not everything is preventable. Life isn't quite that easy.

***

On the logic level, it seemed absurd that Elysium had such poor defenses. After all, real gated communities are kind of defined by their gates. Shooting the ships down from the ground was a bit ridiculous. The radiation danger seemed a bit absurd (though even in the twenty-first century there are some amazing occupational hazards in the third world).

I did, however, actually think the main objective made some sense. It didn't make any sense that downloading the program was lethal (for one character and not another, one assumes), but it did make sense that it worked. Elysium sold its soul to a military industrial complex. They were largely dependent on robots and computers for security. The original maker of the robots tried to reprogram them for a coup, and then someone else reprogrammed them for another coup. It seems perfectly logical to me that President Patel and co. were unable to reverse this robot uprising because they had become so subservient to this technology that was made by the surface-dwellers.

Nytmare said:

As far as I can tell, the rich people are only doing this because they are mean, jerk-faces.

Click to expand...

I'm inclined to agree that their motivations weren't well-explored and the characters on that side of things were trite. It seems to be just assumed that none of them care about what happens on the surface and that they refuse to share their magical technology out of spite, which again rings true to some extent but is exaggerated to the extreme.

I don't know. I guess that overall, I am bothered most by the lost opportunity of this film. I think that Blomkamp is a freaking GENIUS director; I'd just love to see him paired up with a story he didn't write.[/QUOTE]I kind of feel the same way. The sheer visual storytelling of this movie was amazing. The effects in this movie (and in D9 before it) felt much more real than in most movies. The huge CGI battles in Man of Steel and Avengers bored me. The action in this movie kept me riveted. Blomkamp makes an engaging, kinetic, entertaining film.

I really wish he was taking over the Batman franchise after Nolan, or something of similar import. "Hey Neil Blompkamp, would you like to direct a movie based on Dungeons and Dragons?"

Elysium does read to me like many movies that are written and directed by the same guy: that there are parts where a second voice was needed to say "hey, this doesn't make sense, and we can change it and still get the point across". But man, this guy can direct.

Quote from director:

"No, no, no. This isn't science fiction. This is today. This is now."

Click to expand...

Recent news story about plans to build giant ship for rich people to live on.
Creepy.

It's a decent science fiction film. I enjoyed it. The beginning is better than the film's ending if only because I thought the plot a bit predictable (you can see it coming a mile away).


Where District 9 was Blomkamp's thinly veiled comment on Apartheid, Elysium is his thinly veiled comment on immigration--so much so that Spanish seems to be the dominate language spoken among the mostly latin people of Los Angeles, all wishing to be considered citizens of Elysium--the orbiting space station where all illnesses can be cured in a matter of seconds but is only available to the rich and privileged.


Worth watching? Yes, if you're in the mood for this type of film. But, don't expect it to change your religion.


The special effects are top notch and realistic. The action is well done. And, there is a real story there--with real characters. It covers some of the same ground as the recent remake of Total Recall, and, in my opinion, does it better. This would be a great double feature with Blomkamp's earlier film, District 9.