109 Minutes
Rated R
Watch Trailer
It's 2154 and Earth is a shithole. All the rich people left the planet to live on Elysium, a ring-shaped space station with mansions, trees, and magic health machines that will heal everything from a papercut to a grenade-to-the-face. Back on Earth, however, things are run by mean robots and everybody lives in shacks. Matt Damon, ever since he was a little kid, wanted to leave Earth to live on Elysium, and a nun told him it was his destiny. One day on a factory job, he gets locked in a radiation chamber and finds out he has five days to live. So might as well go on a suicide mission to Elysium in an attempt to provide free health care to everyone - including the obligatory love interest's little girl with Leukemia. Elysium, while it sticks its toe in the pool of good ideas (parallels between immigration, health care, class systems), it pretty much devolves into a mindless action film with no rhyme or reason to the story or characters.
Jodie Foster has never been worse. She plays the "lead" bad guy: the government official who will stop at nothing to protect Elysium. She sends out a crazy-lookin' mercenary (Sharlto Copley) to take Damon and Co. down, but we never find out where this abnormal devotion to Elysium comes from. This is Jodie Foster here, and she plays nothing more than the Saturday morning, moustasche-twirling cartoon bad guy. And her accent, whatever it is, sounds terrible. And Matt Damon, as good as he is, seemed miscast. Originally the part was going to go to Eminem of all people; the role requires someone who knows the streets, grew up on the slums. I think Eminem would have been an interesting choice (not sure about his range, but the idea behind that choice is what's cool). I think the only actor that brings any sort of life into the picture is Sharlto Copely playing Kruger, because he's such an over-the-top character. Even William Fichner, playing an Elysium representative on Earth, had more to do in The Lone Ranger.
One thing that irked me was the fact that literally everyone on Earth speaks Spanish and looks Mexican, except for the hero Matt Damon. This completely undermines the whole theme of the film. Everyone on Elysium is white; doesn't the whole idea that it takes the only white guy on Earth to save the day go against everything the movie is trying to say? The world-building at the beginning of the film was pretty good (seeing how crime is "dealt" with and how Damon's job essentially helps his suppressors), but there are so many dumb things and bad pieces of dialogue. There is one scene in the middle of the film, where Matt Damon literally has to leave someone's house because people are looking to kill him, but stays to listen to a little girl ramble about an asinine story involving a hippo, pausing with a look of fascination before heading out. And it's never explained why the people of Elysium don't just share their magic healing technology with Earth. We really needed to get at least some sort of origin of Elysium.
You can kind of tell that Elysium was a sort of dumping ground for leftover ideas from District 9 and the unproduced Halo movie (Blomkamp was originally slated to direct the video game adaption for his debut film). The robots, the ships, the weapons: all reminiscent of Bungie's popular game. Elysium itself is a halo. The problem is he developed the world so much that he forgot to put a solid story in the middle of it. The characters are all one-dimensional, and it's a shame considering how well District 9 juggled its story and themes. I have only one thing to say about this movie:
Rating: C-
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