Elysium review by Landporpus [mild spoilers]

If you have seen the first trailer for Elysium and have seen District 9 knowing that this was Neill Blomkamps next film, you may have thought what I thought. Didn't he already do that?

If you have seen the second trailer for Elysium you have basically seen the movie. It plays out exactly how you think it will after seeing that trailer. Does this ruin the movie or make unwatchable. Not at all. Is is as good as District 9? No.

Thinking about it now, Elysium had a big stamp of fridge logic on it. Watching it in the theater, I was really into it and things seem to line up very well. On the drive home, some problems did started to pop up. Splitting the difference I would say the movie is very good but flawed.

As far as the movie being similar to District 9, I was surprised just how similar it was. It's your average guy, who by circumstance becomes the single most important person in the world and is the link between minorities and those with control. That guy just wants to live and will do anything for things to get back to normal. At a certain point he realizes there is no going back and dose what he can to help the minorities and his final actions help do that. The details of both are what make each movie unique but as a metaphor as to how minorities are treated, its basically the same thing. The only big differences are that in Elysium the main character was a minority to begin with and that in Elysium, things are more black and white. If this was a fantasy film then that would be ok, but in Science fiction the point is usually to get you to see things in a new way, but when everything is spelled out for you in a black and white way, it feels manipulative. Rich people listening to classical music made me laugh.

Intestinally enough, I think the biggest problem with the movie is the characters, and by that I mean there really aren't any. There are people and they do things but we never really get a sense of who these people are. Many fail the Plinked test IMO. Personally, goals and motivations are all very questionable. For the most part the people are all function and no character. Occasionally something minority comes that seems like character building, but its always feel rushed or just dons't make sense. The only exceptions are Spider and maybe Kruger, but only in the sense that Kruger is crazy so whatever he does kind of makes sense anyway.

While not the biggest problem, the most glaring one is the Frey Character who not only has no Character, but she has no function either to point where you could remover her from the film and the film would not change. Right from the first scene with them as kids I was thinking ugh oh when that happens it's usually to emphasize a characters importance in the film when the creators themselves know that they aren't important. It was so blatant that it made me think that she's only in there because the studio said it has to have a love interest and Blomkamp added that just so he could make the movie. I don't know, but for what its worth that annoyed the hell out of me.

So positives. Well theres the obvious ones, The Performances are good. The VFX and Photography are superb. It's pretty well paced, and it doesn't lose your attention. I kind of expected all of these things going in anyway but still, it's always appreciated . Other then that, there are some aspect that I thought were clever and unique but those are mostly in the realm of world building as opposed to plot. Again if you see that trailer you know where it's going, and while most of it feels predictable, it does tell that story fairly well.

Elysium was slightly disappointing to me, but I would still recommend seeing it. It dose have me worried about Blomkamp as a writer. While I think District 9 was great I don't want see that story over and over again even if its well done every time. At the very least I think Blomkamp is capable something else that's good so we will just have to wait for the trailers to ruin in his next movie.