Elysium…

 

I’ve just seen Elysium at the cinema…

The Good: Let’s start by saying it is visually stunning! Earth is now a sprawling shanty town with people living hand to mouth. In contrast Elysium is futuristic, high-tech, clean and inhabited by the ultra-rich. The shots of Elysium in space are great. That’s what sci-fi films should be all about. The scenes on earth have a very real quality about the special effects and are very reminiscent of District 9, which is hardly surprising as it’s the same writer/director. The contrast between Earth and Elysium is very striking and works well. There are some robots that remind me of the old units in I Robot, except these ones have a serious attitude problem. All this makes for some very nice stuff I would like to see again.

The Bad: The characters are really weak and lack consistency. They just don’t have a proper identity and it is hard to really give a crap about them. They throw in a sick child for a sympathy vote, but it lacks anything that really makes me attach with the characters. Admittedly, the “rich verses poor”, “them verses us” thing does get to a working class boy like me, so I naturally wanted all the rich people to die. 🙂

The Ugly: At times it really goes overboard on the shaky camera crap, which just bores me. There are a few very odd scenes where they quickly cut between long distance clean shots and shaky close-up crap, which is really quite strange. I would have expected someone at the studio to notice it looks really stupid, but apparently they didn’t. Perhaps it’s art, or something like that. A few of the fight scenes degenerated into Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, which did nothing for me.

So believe it or not, I actually did enjoy the film, but there were lots of flaws that could have been fixed quite easily to make it amazing. Such a pity! Of course, I’m probably wrong because I heard the guy sitting next to me tell his girlfriend/wife, “That’s the best film I’ve ever seen!”  🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

2 thoughts on “Elysium…”

  1. Yeah, I’ve completely turned off the “shaky camera” thing. Original in the first Bourne series, but after that it got old real quick…
    Cool movie, but instead of Jodie Foster I’d prefer Uma Thurman: she just does the über-bitch thing so much better!

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