Movie Review: Elysium

I'm way behind on movie reviews, so I'm going to be guilty of just shoving some down the pipe.  Sorry for that. 

Elysium (2013)

In the year 2154, the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth. A man takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds.  Short synopsis of Elysium taken fromIMDb.com

Where to start?  Hmmm...  The violence in Elysium was definitely the R rating here, as well as language.  Seems redundant to say it was R rated and then tell you why, but some R ratings beat the socks off of other R ratings for their "R-ness," in my opinion.  And in this case, I was actually a bit annoyed by it.  Seemed like they had money in the budget and so decided to show things that otherwise could have been done without.  The violence usually didn't serve much specific purpose here.  We live in a world where that sort of dismemberment and severe gunshot /explosive wound trauma happens every day somewhere, and often to U.S. GIs.  I guess it just didn't work for me.

And the concept of the healing machines on the Elysium space station seemed to be a tad bit overly on the nose.  This film is really concerned with cashing in on the healthcare scare (not that I'm saying healthcare isn't a valid concern, mind you).  It emphasizes the fact that the developed nations of the world have vastly superior healthcare options (if you can afford it) over the developing world.  But that doesn't help with the plot.  For one thing, we don't stop to wonder about how these rich people on this space station are getting their food and clean water, which is a more pressing concern for the average person than curing their leukemia.  Sure, healthcare, and miracle machines, would be nice in our day and age.  But really, the movie glosses over other realities in favor of focusing just on healthcare.  This is too convenient for me.

Introducing the 2154 Nissan GTR!  It's like the previous one hundred and forty one model year GTR's, but it has Mad Max-like adaptations that make survival in our modern dystopian daily commute a real breeze! / Source: fandango.com

 

As for the action, it was passable.  The film seemed to want to do several things at once some times.  And the main villains were almost incomprehensible in their accents.  At least to me.  Plus, the main baddie killing Jodie Foster's character and then running amok on the space station?  That was dumb.  Felt like they needed a big bad guy fight at the end and so they put that part in to keep the audience from realizing they were watching a movie that was all about protesting healthcare issues or something.  Like it was in the playbook, and so we just had to have it.  You know: "insert mind-numbing action sequence here, for best effect."  Yeah, right.

Speaking of Foster, she was really over the top in this one.  I wonder if she enjoyed making this film, or if it was a big summer paycheck she was seeing as she delivered her ritzy-accented, and overblown lines. 

And Wahlburg?  Well he did what he always does.  So many big name actors in Hollywood are not type-cast anymore, I think, so much as they play one character with a different background bio to fill the moment.  And that's what the movie-going audience pays to see.  We don't go see a guy who gets a exo-suit surgically attached to his body, we go see Mark Walhburg get an exo-suit attached to his body.  Does it change Walhburg in the slightest?  Nope.  Same actor playing the same type character.  It seems sad to me that so few movies seem to strive for range out of their actors.  What, you say an action movie shouldn't try; it's just an action movie?  I beg to differ, and could argue it, if you gave me a chance.  But that isn't important.  I think the vehicle hurts these people's careers.  Of course, they still get paid, so there is that (forgive my sarcasm, though I know it is dripping from the computer screen lately).

So it will take another 140 or so years for Rayethon's exo-suit, which was in testing with the US Army the last I heard, to be pirated for use by ordinary folks living in the uber-harsh twenty-second century?  Perhaps people in the next 140 years will just get generally lazier and dumber than they are now.  If so, perhaps the Elysium space station is just for those folks who had the good sense to use their noggins for something productive.  I'm just sayin... / Source: secureanr.mediaspanonline.com

 

In the end, Elysium was worth the Redbox rental, but only just barely.  And that said only because it had been awhile since I had seen anything, and was bored.  Stacked up against better options, Elysium just doesn't measure up.

Oh, and just in case you haven't had enough on Elysium's faults, here is an article on the problems with the sci-fi aspect of the film not holding up to 140 years worth of development.  The author, Peter Hall, makes some valid points, I think.

The parting comment:

Source: redbirdacres.blogspot.com

 

But really, they figured out how to solve Earth's problems back in 1973.  And that movie even had the classic line: 'You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We've gotta stop them somehow!' Ah Chuck Heston...