Damn. Did the Double. Two weeks. Two films. Two disappointments.
And I think I know where the fault lies twice over. But I’ll come to that later.
Elysium was not the heavenly experience I was hoping for. The storyline was terribly adolescent and unoriginal ,in fact, beat for beat almost identical to District 9.Yet I just couldn’t buy into the premise of this one. A gritty ,realistic future aught to feel like one, but at real key moments in the story this just didn’t and it kept tripping itself subsequently in the plot holes it had ripped into the script.
The exo-skeleton was perhaps the worst single part of it. There are thoasands of well designed (and armed) policing /servant robots and that tubular stick insect frame drilled into human bones was the best they could come up with? Get away!!! And what happened to all the other satellites, space stations, planetary bases? I mean everyone seemed to have a space capable orbital shuttle on hand at the drop of a hat, even in the slums. But no other off world colonies? What about orbital defensive weapons? I almost wept when I saw Kruger fire those tiny missiles from Earth to attack those shuttles. Who wrote the script I thought, a ****ing idiot? Hell, couldn’t they have thought of a more interesting way to get aboard Elysium? Did the med centre have to rebuild Krugers face in just seconds (including his scruffy beard?) yet earth based hospitals (with billions of paying customers) have to rely on plaster casts and bandages? Give me a break!!!! I could go on and on but I’d get boring and predicable , just like the story.
And then we have the characters. They were so woefully one dimensional and under developed here in comparison to D9 I couldn’t believe it was the same writer and director. Poor Jodi Foster, great legs shame about the rest. If they had made her just one tenth as interesting as she was in “Inside Man” I’d have been ten times happier. Same for nearly all of them. Matt did a decent job but Jason Bourne ,a trained killer had more empathy and depth than this guy did.
Overall they spent three times the budget on this one and ended up with a film that was effectively half as good as his first. And in a very real sense this one was.
Because what it was missing was any real sense of heart and soul, as supplied by the female half of the writing equation. In this case, Terri Tatchell who co wrote District 9 but had nothing to do with Elysium. Same for Jane Goodman with Kick Ass but not KA2, which was the other bad twin in my Double D. Think Marcia Lucas in Star Wars and Empire but not Jedi. The influence Terri must have had on the D9 script is just so obvious by what was missing for the most part with Elysium, and thank god she’s involved with writing “Chappie” otherwise I suspect it would end up as devoid of feeling and humour . It’s the only explanation I have for why Elysium feels more like sci fi computer game and less like a decent interesting story about people living in a science fictional world.
If I’d have seen this film before D9 I would not have been so disappointed. Its not a bad film at all, just so much weaker and immature in comparison. For example for all the briefly horrible amount of needless gore and swearing in it they could have taken it out and down a rating and probably taken more money from a much bigger audience.
On the positive side, like nearly all the effects heavy films released this year, it looks spectacularly good . The designs (excluding exo skeletons!!!) are for the most part great and the action pieces and live elements blend together seamlessly with the model work and CGI in a way that’s almost too convincing to be believable,some of the shots were staggering beautiful to look at.
Anyway in summary I wasn’t sorry to have seen it at the cinema because of that, it looked superb on the big screen. Its just that because of the script I’m left feeling ever so slightly sorry I just don’t want to watch it again any time soon.