Elysium

I saw ELYSIUM last night. As my most anticipated movie of 2013 I was pretty excited to get into a press screening at the Arclight Hollywood. We were literally the last people in line, got the last passes, were the last to have our phones taken and bagged, and the last to enter the theater seconds before the light dimmed for the screening. That’s when an usher opened up a reserved aisle, and we got seats together in a perfect spot. Don’t know what the moral of this story is. Sometimes it pays to be late?

Anyway, the movie is entertaining and goes faster than a dropship breaking through Earth’s stuffy atmosphere, but I my feelings are I only liked it rather than loved it. The style and the execution of the world is amazing, and every frame is recognizable as a Neil Blomkamp film, but a lot of stuff doesn’t land. It follows Matt Damon’s character, a downtrodden worker human on Earth, as he tries to get himself to the orbiting ringworld of Elysium for urgent medical attention. He has five days to do it before he dies, and a bunch of people on Earth, as well as up in space, do not want that to happen (because they hate poor people? It’s never explicitly explained).

The real problem I had is with the film’s antagonists – for a start there’s too many. It muddies the plot to have not one, but four different people against the lead for different reasons. Specifically, Sharlto Copley’s character is a kind of government-sanctioned bounty hunter straight out of a comic book, and he really is the film’s weak point. He has ludicrous action, barely any motive and just a weird performance that doesn’t work at all.

There’s a bunch of little plot holes that don’t really bother me, but the general switching of stakes kept the story from really building to a nice ending. There was a goal, quickly achieved, then another totally separate goal that needed attention, and so on.

It’s entertaining, but not the genre-defining kick to the balls I was hoping for. Lower your expectations, cause Neil Blomkamp is human after all.