Neill Blomkamp's Elysium (Post-release)

It was good but not as good as District 9.

Sharlto Copley stole the show from Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. It shares a lot of similarities with District 9, sets and props looked the same and it also had similar themes and political views. But you can tell that from the trailer.
 
I was really down with the concept of the film, the props, and costumes...but storywise the attempt just wasn't enough. I thought the movie would be a 8/10 or a 9/10...However walking out of the theater I'm saying 4/10 at best. :( And I REALLLLY wanted to love this film, but I just can't because of the extremly simple plot line. All the things that happened were literally all the things I were hoping wouldn't happen.
 
Elysium US release date, August 9. India release date, August 16. Then pushed for August 23 and now September 27. Great job Sony Pictures India, totally makes business sense.
 
Visual effects 10, Script 6

I loved the effects in this, very well done mix of practical and CG. Only issue was the exo skeleton, and that is only that it looked like the guts from a puppet rather than high end tech from 2154. The Script made me feel psychic for about an hour and a half. Definitely worth the watch but not with expectations of a high order. I guess I would say my biggest disappointment was sitting back when it was over and feeling like I had watched a Mockumentary about Mexican emigration and healthcare.

Killed any love I may have had for the movie, this is a personal issue with the movie not a technical issue. I go to them to decompress away from the political baggage and other real life issues for and hour or two. Skip the CG and start in Mexico, swap LA for Elysuim and your there. The great authors of science fiction often wrote political satire into their works on a regular basis but this felt more like the science fiction was the dust cover to a political satire. Could have been a great movie with the crew and effects people on this. There is a great mockumentary called "C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America" if your want to see how well one can be done. In the end this could have been two good movies, a great scifi one and a separate mockumentary
 
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.
 
Actually, from a perfect government perspective, it made sense to have a deniable ops soldier firing missiles at them. It gave them the ability to deny attacking anyone.
 
Fortunately, they can deny the attack but unfortunately not all those thousands of bits of shuttle debris that would continue along the same path to collide with Elysium at very high velocity. Not a clever idea to use missiles. Or, I should note, leave orbit achieving weapons tech hidden in an abandoned van so easily open to break in and salvage in a ghetto where car jacking seems common place . Great way to ensure Elysium is blackmailed when they are nicked. And given the number of shuttle attempts flying to Elysium all the time (did you see all those people in the deportation holding pens?)who else would have ordered it? Pretty fortunate Kruger was just walking past it at the time, a few minutes either way the shuttles would have made it. Lazy stupid writing with no respect for basic common sense gets on my nerves. Lazers / microwaves would have been invisible and more effectively quicker in space. Want to transmit an encrypted program in seconds to a space station or I know, I'll down load it into my head first and go myself !!!! Would it have made any sense for Elysium not to have some form of orbital defensive capabilities in order to deflect meteors /space debris/ terrorist attacks?
And what governments existed besides Elysium? You have an unregistered warship flying cris-cross across Los Angeles ,nobody says a word and yet we have all these robot police officers bullying people at bus stops . But space capable shuttles are available everywhere? Who built those? Where was the flying police force or army? The whole Earths a ghetto ????? You can get a shuttle to try to fly you to Elysium with a sixty percent chance it will be blasted into pieces BUT not some other place on the planet with a better health care system? Give me a break. It was a poorly thought out ,unrealistic teenagers "vision" of a future. It would have been far more interesting IF an Earth government had more obviously existed then you could have had a bribery /corruption storyline that would have made more sense. This whole story was as old as the hills and done better in sci fi decades ago. That's what really annoyed me about it. It was so much less of an interesting science fiction story, more of ham fisted political protest about immigration policy. Like a lot of films this summer it looked great but once you've done to playing with the ideas inside the nice shiny wrapping paper you've done with it in a hour (or less). And ,coming from the guy who made District Nine, that's a MAJOR disappointment.
 
I had a lot of the same problems as you, CT. I found a lot wrong with the movie and not enough to like to turn off my 'nitpick this to death' button, sadly for me as I really wanted to like this. It had the social commentary of District 9 but none of the humour or soul, and the more I think about it the more I notice how much the humour in that film resembles that of Peter Jackson's films...HMMM...

I thought it was amazing on the technical side but found the plot holes hugely distracting in what had been hyped as an intelligent SF action flick. I gave Prometheus and Pacific Rim a pass for their nonsense but the bar was supposed to be a lot higher here. Ground to orbit shuttles readily available in an environment with social injustice this extreme? Well then they'd be weaponised in a heartbeat and used to destroy the station. If we the masses can't have what you bastards up there have got, you can't have it either...

It was tense and it looked amazing and all the rest, but I have to agree. Too loaded with inconsistencies, a noticeable lack of the level of world-building one would have expected after District 9 and a jarring fairytale ending. I feel like a spoiled brat for saying this given the amount of work that has gone into it but I can't give it a high mark for story or characters.
 
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Oh, and somebody slap a roof on that station! It's nowhere near big enough to retain atmosphere through spin gravity. See, stuff like that I'd HAPPILY give a pass to as artistic license, if the story had engaged me more. Eh.
 
Frankly, I think casting Ninja would have been interesting as hell.

Too right. Dammit! Now I want to see THAT movie. :lol

They should do an Elysium 2 set a few hundred years after the first where the first space sanctuary was ruined by having everyone who wanted to go there and they had to build a bigger better version for the rich people to go to. Rinse wash repeat.

The film stresses the point people are trying to get aboard not merely because it's a nice place to live; they probably couldn't have any realistic hope of doing more than hiding out long enough to MAYBE get near a healing machine. That was the whole lure, as I understood it - the healing machines are completely unknown on Earth. (Even though space shuttles, powered exos, backyard brain surgery and instant laser ID tattooing are commonplace).

After watching the movie, I suddenly remembered the first viral video that came out about it before anyone knew what the movie was.

Nothing at all. I was waiting for some reference to it, without much real expectation we'd see any. Looks like the story changed at some point.

I am not even going to pretend that I didn't walk into this movie without bias. The previews made it clear this was a 99%er vs 1%er story, no matter how much Blomkamp claims it isn't (and I too found his statement that implied the opposite of "liberal" is "racist" as highly objectionable). Knowing that was the story I was going to get, I still tried to go in and enjoy it for what it was worth and for the good things the movie had to offer.

I had no problem with the basic concept of the story, I can see it would be a political issue for the US and some might take it as one here too, due to our arguable 'problem' with boat people. I agree with every other point you made about a thousand per cent though, especially:

I never felt for him the way I felt for Wikus in District 9. I never really cared for anyone. The movie simply lacked sincere emotional depth. As many others have pointed out, it felt very fomulaic and you ended up just waiting on things to happen that you already knew HAD to happen in a story like this.

- AMEN, man. Especially Max. I was almost chafing for him to get on with it. Just hurry up and get it over with, man. We know you're going to anyway! Meh.
 
I'll stop after this, promise. :p

It was ok, but it had WAY too much shakey-cam.

I can take a lot of shakey-cam, but this made me feel seasick. First time ever.

Did anyone have a WTF moment when there was that one random matrix-style rotating shot in shaky-cam during the Max/Kruger fight? It felt so out of place.

Not just you. I was like 'where did THAT come from? Will there be more?' - nada. Weird stylistic decision there.

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!!!

It's as if the design mandate was "make it as massively unlike the District 9 exo-suit as possible, even if it has to look like ****". I mean that thing was a string bag. You never got a real sense it was enhancing anything at all. It provided almost zero armour protection and as a story element was waaaaay under-sold.

The man-portable missile system had me almost crying. That seemed like a misplaced desire to portray the majority of Elysium residents, politicians, etc, as not being so bad. Which is crap. They're so elite they're practically a different species. "Don't breathe on me" was symptomatic. Or maybe it was just an attempt to establish Kruger as a badarse, but a mistaken one IMO. I wanted to see Foster give the order to bring down the shuttles long before they were on a collision trajectory, I wanted to see the station itself deploy the weapons and I wanted to see the president congratulate her for a textbook operation afterwards.

You're right about the med centre thing with Kruger; was rather too Fifth Element for a supposedly hard SF flick.

Interesting point about Tatchell. I hadn't realised she wasn't involved.
 
Went and saw it this afternoon and LOVED IT!!!

I can't put my finger on exactly what did it for me, but I came out feeling that I got way more than my money's worth.

A couple of the things that really stood out and made it completely enjoyable for me:
- The FX were great but did not overwhelm the story.
- They didn't try to have Matt in every scene. When there are long scenes without the star, that rates an A+ in my book.

(y)thumbsup(y)thumbsup(y)thumbsup:thumbsup
 
I still haven't seen the movie, and I'm not sure I want to pay for it (maybe at the discount cinema), but I just finished reading the screenplay. I didn't mean to; I just wanted to get the flavor of it and then I couldn't stop. That's only happened a couple of times. But while it was a compelling read, it just sort of petered out in the end. (And they poured magic powder on Kruger's face to regenerate it after he took a shotgun blast? Come on, now.) Blommie took an interesting concept and didn't really capitalize on it. It just turned into a heist movie. Ocean's 11 in Space. When I finally do see it, it will be interesting to see how closely they stuck to the script.
 
Sharlto Copley is giving away his hero sword used during the filming of Elysium. This contest is open to American residents only. More giveaways for fans in other countries is in the pipeline.

From Sharlto Copley's Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?...set=a.457028117368.250681.108950282368&type=1

"WANT TO WIN KRUGER'S SWORD? Hi guys - i've decided to give away my beloved sword to one lucky facebook fan. Yup, it's the one and only actual "hero sword" I used in the film. We had other stunt ones, but this was the only "hero" one that I had to be careful not to damage during filming. It's made of aircraft grade aluminum. I'm sorry but due to legal issues, we are only able to offer this contest to American residents. Will have to find some more stuff to give away for other countries later. "

http://www.facebook.com/pages/SHARLTO-COPLEY/108950282368?id=108950282368&sk=app_473038836144434

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151851900327369&id=108950282368

From Sharlto Copley's FB page:

"CONGRATULATIONS TO Jon H. from Big Bend, Wisconsin - Jon is the proud new owner of KRUGER'S SWORD! Congrats Jon - sword will be on its way to you shortly."
 
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