Elysium

Sadly this was disappointing.  And from what I gather I wasn’t the only person who felt this way.

Some spoilers in this thing

It seems to me that the entire movie revolves around these med bay devices.  They’re the end goal for the entire story.  Max (Matt Damon (The Legend of Bagger Vance)) needs to get to one because he’s dying and the love interest’s daughter needs to get to one because she has leukemia.  It’s not about going to Elysium because they want a better way of life exactly but more because that’s where the med bays are.  If these things were on Jupiter then that’s where the characters would be trying to go.

Now that we’ve established that let’s look at the med bays themselves.  Writer/director Neil Blomkamp made them too powerful.  They can heal anything, and I mean anything, no problem.  Kruger (Sharlto Copley (The A-Team)) gets his face blown off but the med bay is able to fix him up, give him a new face and he’s back in action in no time.  It’s just too silly for a movie this serious in my opinion.  This thing shouldn’t be able to perform miracles because then it takes weight out of the film. 

There are two other aspects though that also helps remove said weight.  One is that the med bay works at lightning speed.  Not only can this machine fix any medical problem but it can do it in an instant.  And the other is that it doesn’t require a medical professional or professional of any kind to run the thing.  Any person can lay down in there and be fixed without the supervision of a doctor or technician.  Again, they’re too powerful.

So since the med bays can solve any medical quandary, work at an incredible rate and are self-operating without the need of any assistance why the fuck aren’t they on earth?  There doesn’t seem to be any reason why these devices shouldn’t be easily accessible on every block.  There isn’t any talk about them requiring too much power to operate or being astronomically expensive (there’s one in every home on Elysium plus they have spaceships full of them).  I don’t get it.  All medical problems can be alleviated instantaneously.  At the very least you would think a bunch of folks on earth would’ve made knock off med bays.  Maybe they can’t reconstruct a face from scratch or work at such a fast pace but they can cure most diseases, fix broken bones and do it in a half hour (as opposed to seconds).  Who the hell wouldn’t be working around the clock to either smuggle one of these to earth or build one themselves?

And I know what you’re thinking.  What about the ID needed for the machine to work?  Well it looked easy enough to make a fake one with those ID guns or overwrite the computer program to accept anybody, with or without ID.  So that’s not an issue.

With this stuff in mind the whole film falls apart for me.  Other plot holes, like rewriting the code to make everyone on earth a citizen of Elysium when it would appear to be just as easy to rewrite the code again and switch earth people back to non-citizens, are only extra whip cream on top of this not very well constructed sundae.  Blomkamp didn’t think this picture through.  He had his metaphor for healthcare and that it’s not widely available to every person everywhere (although I think he was mostly targeting the U.S.) but didn’t work on it long enough to make sure that all the pieces made sense.  It’s the script that’s really poor here, the foundation of the movie.

Just to touch briefly on some of the acting, Matt Damon was good in this (especially in the beginning) but ultimately not very memorable.  Jodie Foster (Maverick (1994)) was also fine but her character, Delacourt, was kinda bad.  She was too evil of a villain.  You can’t do that.  The bad guy has to either be fun (like the Joker or Stranix (Tommy Lee Jones) from Under Siege) or have some sort of redeeming quality that makes you feel for the character (like Darth Vader or Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films/books).  Delacourt is part of the JTGE Union (Just Too Godamn Evil Union) along with Colonel Quaritch from Avatar and others.

The guy who stole the movie for me though was Krugar.  This was an entertaining bad guy that I loved to watch.  He’s badass and mean and not only a great character but also played very well by Sharlto Copley.  He should’ve been the only villain instead of having to share that spot with Delacourt.  Delacourt was a superfluous character I think whose main purpose was to make you hate Elysium by proxy.  We never see its citizens act like assholes and the president doesn’t seem like such a bad person.  Nothing ever comes of the Delacourt coup so that wasn’t really necessary either.

Oh and I also want to mention how horrible the action is shot.  It’s mostly close ups, quick cuts and shaky cam all up your ass.  Jesus guys, put the fuckin’ camera down.  The way action is shot has been improving for a long while now and I thought we might be past the style that’s employed here.  But this is some of the worst I’ve seen in a film that’s been released in the last five or so years probably.

With some rewriting this could’ve been a really fantastic piece of cinema.  I liked Blomkamp’s other picture, District 9, quite a bit.  That was a fun, exciting movie that also happened to have a message.  He did an excellent job with that one.  But the thing about Elysium that stands out the most to me is that it feels rushed (even though there was a four year gap between District 9 and this).  Shit just wasn’t ready for prime time.  It’s like the first draft of something that will eventually be really damn good.  The idea definitely wasn’t given enough time to develop.  Or maybe Blomkamp’s heart wasn’t in the project anymore and he just wanted to get this one over with.  There’s also the possibility that District 9 was a fluke and Blomkamp isn’t as good as we all hoped he would be.  But that’s being way too harsh.  Elysium is only his second feature.  You gotta give him a couple more movies to see how this guy truly shapes up.

But you know what?  I don’t think I want to go to Elysium.  Seems like a real hassle.  I’m fine right here.