So I watched Elysium on Tuesday, and really enjoyed it. But the more I've been thinking about it, the more disappointed I become. Which is annoying when that happens, isn't it?
Let's get the good out of the way: THOSE ROBOT DESIGNS. Or, well, they actually called them droids in the movie, didn't they? Which was unexpected because doesn't Lucasfilm have that word copyrighted? Or well, I guess the copyright now extends to Disney, doesn't it? Anyways, I liked them a lot. And the titular colony itself, which was designed by Syd Mead. That's killer. The CG in this movie just looked so effortless. It was also nice to see a movie with a predominately Hispanic cast, though that makes Matt Damon stick out way more than he should.
I liked his "probation officer" being a shitty bot that looks like it was built by whoever came up with the Johnny Cab from Total Recall (a movie this bears a few passing similarities too), and it offering him pills to calm him down was the one moment where this movie leaned REALLY hard into Philip K. Dick territory. I wish it'd borrowed more from his (massive) body of work, honestly. I also appreciate the fact that Blomkamp is more than willing to really fuck up his characters in a way that most blockbuster movies shy away from.
And man, Sharlto Copley as Kruger. What a fuckin' piece of work that dude is. Just a grizzly psychopath who makes everybody else look like they aren't even trying. Seeing him all buffed up and foul after playing the scrawny, nerdy Wickus in D9 blew my mind. There's no doubt that he steals the show here.
But the story, the action...none of it was terribly great. For a movie about a giant floating colony occupied by rich people and their droid servants, taking place more than 50 years in the future, there's not a lot of world-building is there? Maybe it's because I saw it not long after my fourth(!!) time watching Pacific Rim, but everything is just kind of surface level, isn't it?
The main thing driving the plot, the main reason people on Earth want to find a way to Elysium, are the Medpods, which scan and magically fix anything that ails you. But who made those? Why aren't they available on Earth? Who came up with the idea of building a whole new colony for rich people and abandoning everyone else? How does the rest of the world, or even just our own government, respond to something like that? What was the original purpose for the exosuit thing they brutally strap Max into? Why do so many people on Elysium speak French? That was French, right?
Things don't feel as fully realized in the movie as I'd like them to be. There's a lot of cool tech going on, but it's just kind of there, and it's all disconnected from the rest of the movie. Max's exosuit looks cool, sure, but beyond the neural download and the two or three fights he gets in, it doesn't serve much purpose at all. It sure as hell isn't keeping him alive to do the job like I thought it would.
Reviewers have been talking about the social commentary, but there doesn't seem to be as much going on here as there is in District 9. To me, anyways. There's the immense divide between the rich and the poor, sure, but that's just setup, not much else. ThinkProgress has a good article about how it fails as a commentary on how terrible our healthcare system is, something that I barely even thought about while watching the movie. Something that occured to me today is the scene where Jodie Foster's character (why is she trying to impersonate Shatner in this?) orders Kruger to shoot down the shuttles heading to Elysium...
...Shuttles filled with sick and injured people. Sick and injured people who are largely Hispanic. Trying to get to a colony populated pretty much exclusively with white people. That is totally referring to the immigration issues we've been having in the US lately, in a not very subtle manner, and yet I don't think I've seen anyone mention it yet.
So I think that's the big problem I have, is that the movie doesn't really try to comment on any one issue in a strong manner, just these passing references to a number of things while not really managing to say much about any of them. None of it is important to this movie in the way that the apartheid in South Africa was to District 9. It just feels like all of the care and attention just went into designing shit (without explaining much of it) and getting Max and Kruger into some nasty fights. It's too shallow, there's just not as much to chew on as District 9 had.
And that last fight between them...that was a mess in the way it was shot and edited, wasn't it?
All of that aside, I do want to watch it again. I feel like I missed some bits. There may be more going on in other parts of the movie that I just overlooked. Possibly my expectations were way too high, I was wanting more of a movie that had nothing in common with Iron Man 3 or Star Trek 2, something with a lot more meat on it. And it's still much better than those two I just mentioned.
It also probably doesn't help that I've been mainlining Criterion Collection movies on this free 2 month Hulu Plus subscription that I got. I'll be writing about those soon, because very little compares to the greatness that is the Sword of Doom.