Elysium (2013)
Rating- 15
Running Time- 1 hour 49 minutes
Directed by- Neill Blomkamp
Written by- Neill Blomkamp
Elysium seemed to
come out of nowhere. All anyone seemed to know about it is that it was made by
the same guy who made District 9 (Neill
Blomkamp, 2009) and that it had Matt Damon in it. Later, via trailers and what
not, we found out the general idea of the film. Being that in the not too
distant future the rich have left Earth behind to form a colony on a space
station called Elysium and have somewhere along the line found a way to cure
all illness and heal all wounds. The trailer also told us that Matt Damon’s character
has a terminal illness and so aims to get to Elysium in order to receive the
kind of medical treatment only they can offer, that being an instantaneous
cure. So it aptly fulfilled the function of a trailer; it gave us the general
plot, it told us who the star is and it established the genre. So why then did
it take the first hour of the film to tell us what they have already managed to
tell us in a three minute trailer?
It is fair enough that not everyone who goes to watch the
film will have seen the trailer and that the film has to establish the film’s setting
and the character’s situation but why should it take over half of the movie to
achieve this when, as the trailer proved, it can be done in a matter of
minutes. This extremely slow beginning (moving into middle) takes you out of
the movie because of its tedious nature which is exactly the opposite of what
it’s supposed to achieve. But I remained patient with the movie and waited for
something exciting to happen, which it did. There is a genuinely entertaining
battle scene pitting Damon and crew against some militant robots and, despite
the odd goof such as one of the robots taking a good few seconds to lock onto
Damon only to then fire madly and miss with every bullet in Storm
Trooper-eque fashion, it goes some way to redeeming the languorous opening. But
it's all over after ten minutes and the end of this segment coincides with the
beginning of fifteen more sluggish minutes to set up the final act of the film.
By this point I don’t even care what will happen to the characters or how the
final few scenes will pan out because I am completely disconnected from the
film. Maybe that’s why the last twenty five minutes felt like a blur, or maybe
it was down to the needless use of stedi-cam at any available moment which made
concentrating on any of the action scenes near impossible due to the shaky
nature of the on screen ‘non’-events. When the film was finally over I was so
disconnected that I wasn’t even thinking about how that film’s ending was
predictable and somewhat clichéd, I was thinking “how, in a total of seventy
five minutes of establishing scenes, did they not explain how people can be
completely healed from anything (no matter how severe) just by lying on a bed
for a few seconds?” In fact at this point my mind was filled with thoughts like
these and it left me wondering, why?
At first it seemed obvious why. I was bored with the film’s
story line and so my mind led to other aspects of the film. Like how can the
majority of people on Earth survive when we are told most of them don’t have
jobs and therefore no income? How can a group of Mexican rebels successfully integrate
a robot exoskeleton into Matt Damon’s nervous system? And why if this
technology exists do more people not have it? And why does no one bat an eyelid
that Matt Damon has suddenly become half robot? Why do people carry data in
their brains if they can only access it if they plug themselves into a computer
anyway? But on reflection, I had it backwards. All of these inconsistencies and
plot holes was what led to my disconnection from the film and not the other way round.
All of the above issues deconstructed the futuristic realism that was trying to
be created and therefore I didn’t believe anything that I saw on screen. This
made the movie almost impossible to enjoy and made identifying with the
characters even harder.
Overall, the film was ambitious and had some good ideas but
its failure to create a believable environment didn’t allow a solid base to be
formed for these ideas to grow and flourish, they instead fell through the
cracks and the few that remained did little more than wither. A good representation
of how far away I felt from the film’s world is the fact that all the way
through this review I have referred to Matt Damon’s character as Matt Damon and
not the character’s actual name. This may be due to his star power but I think
it’s more due to the fact that I didn’t ever relate or empathize with his
character and therefore never cared who he was, I saw him only as Matt Damon.
*All of the timings are approximate. I didn’t accurately time
the length of each segment though it did cross my mind more than once to do so
while I was watching the film.
 |
| Final Rating. Two Stars. |
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