Elysium (NEW BLOMKAMP!)

[Pubrick]

Was pretty thoroughly disappointed by this. For a story that could have been so simple (see: the trailer) it's needlessly complicated/convoluted. Jodie Foster is horrible. Matt Damon's character development basically amounts to a few flashbacks and that one line in the trailer where he jokes about having hair products in his bag. Visually though it's the shit. The production design is amazing and Blomkamp is in the top 1% of directors who know how to seamlessly incorporate FX into their films. But storywise it's a letdown. You never really get that "Oh shit!" moment you're waiting for because you don't really give a shit about what's going on. Removed from the narrative of Neill Blomkamp: Geek Savior, this is not a very good movie. (But since I can't ignore that, I still hope this does well.) Like most of this summer's blockbusters this really just needed another few passes on the script. 

Could you be completely wrong about this like that other time you were completely wrong about something?

D9 was sooooo good.

I have to believe.

[modage]

I know a handful of other nerds who were really in the tank for Blomkamp that also came out disappointed (though perhaps not to as harsh of a degree as I have). Like I said, I want Blomkamp to succeed as much as anyone but remove his name and I'm not sure this was any more successful than something like "Oblivion."

[jenkins]

that fires me up, because no one really thought about what a great job kosinski and miranda did for oblivion. mainly because the oblivion story was frayed. but like, after earth had such a more bizarre story (which makes me like that story more, btw, and no i can't even explain) and after earth did not have the cinematic drive of oblivion

a real guessing game here. i'll go guess. i also thought d9 was good, annd. and idk. i'll go guess

[modage]

I was actually pleasantly surprised by "Oblivion." Like "Elysium," it's visually off the charts but runs into problems in the story dept.

[jenkins]

oh ok. fascinated by what's going on in story developments that have $100,000,000 budget goals

i like hearing its chart conquering

[picolas]

*slight, situation-type spoilers*

ohhhh nooooooo. where to begin... everything about this movie that isn't strictly visual is dumb. there are so many moments that beg the question "what were you expecting to happen?" like when you fly three ships filled with illegal immigrants towards a giant space station in plain sight, and the space station has missiles and extensive ship-tracking technology. or when you sneak into a big metal box with a jammed door and try to unjam the door. the inciting incident of elysium is matt damon, for no obvious reason, trying to make a police robot laugh. and i don't mean a silly jetsons-type police robot. i'm talking about a soulless, oppressive government-programmed robot who is prone to beating humans who look at it the wrong way. it's as though no one has ever lived in this universe before the movie begins. jodie foster asks the PRESIDENT of elysium if he has any children.

i'm beginning to suspect the real genius behind district 9 was sharlto copley, who disguised the absurdity of his world with an incredible performance, and most importantly, his own improvised dialogue. in elysium, blomkamp's writing has nowhere to hide and it's painful at every turn. there's an incredible scene where damon explains he has to get the fuck out of here before everyone dies and then, on his way out engages a child in conversation about animals for no reason. the audience was openly laughing. the more i think about it, the more blown away i am by copley. he gives the strongest performance in elysium hands-down, even with a horrible, poorly motivated character, alongside matt damon and jodie foster, who give probably the worst performances of their careers. jodie foster is PROFOUNDLY AWKWARD, partly because of a strange accent that she seems to be making up as she goes, and partly because of this faux-politician posturing she infuses into every moment, every movement, every syllable. but yeah, copley creates a kind of magic out of clearly dire conditions for any actor.

the single tone of the movie is unrelenting LOUDNESS, basically waving a gun in your face and saying YOU BETTER FUCKING LOVE THIS SHIT. within the first 10 minutes i was numb. there's no variety. just maximum intensity at all times. the score exemplifies this. it's essentially a bunch of big booms, and it covers at least 70% of the movie.

the visual world is totally believable and entertaining in the same way district 9 was. i marvel at the integration of effects and makeup and whatever else is going on.. it manages to make the movie watchable. if blomkamp understood how to make his characters interesting (which sharlto gets) he could have something truly special again, like d9. not that i want another d9 necessarily. i just want something that lives up to his effects.

[jenkins]

well shit. the end

[Ghostboy]

I was actually pleasantly surprised by "Oblivion." Like "Elysium," it's visually off the charts but runs into problems in the story dept.

Oblivion was better than this simply on the basis of that awesome synth score. It's also just better.

[polkablues]

The movie basically felt like what would happen if some studio exec saw District 9 and said, "Do another one just like that, but with more money and oh by the way we have some notes." My belief is that it felt that way because that is exactly what happened.

[Kal]

I just saw this a couple hours ago. It was entertaining but when I was about to get home I saw a big billboard of the movie in the street and thought "oh wow, I just saw that... and completely forgot about it 20 minutes later"...

[pete]

holy shit that was a killer review. I boldfaced two of my favorite sentences in there. god this board is great.

*slight, situation-type spoilers*

ohhhh nooooooo. where to begin... everything about this movie that isn't strictly visual is dumb. there are so many moments that beg the question "what were you expecting to happen?" like when you fly three ships filled with illegal immigrants towards a giant space station in plain sight, and the space station has missiles and extensive ship-tracking technology. or when you sneak into a big metal box with a jammed door and try to unjam the door. the inciting incident of elysium is matt damon, for no obvious reason, trying to make a police robot laugh. and i don't mean a silly jetsons-type police robot. i'm talking about a soulless, oppressive government-programmed robot who is prone to beating humans who look at it the wrong way. it's as though no one has ever lived in this universe before the movie begins. jodie foster asks the PRESIDENT of elysium if he has any children.

i'm beginning to suspect the real genius behind district 9 was sharlto copley, who disguised the absurdity of his world with an incredible performance, and most importantly, his own improvised dialogue. in elysium, blomkamp's writing has nowhere to hide and it's painful at every turn. there's an incredible scene where damon explains he has to get the fuck out of here before everyone dies and then, on his way out engages a child in conversation about animals for no reason. the audience was openly laughing. the more i think about it, the more blown away i am by copley. he gives the strongest performance in elysium hands-down, even with a horrible, poorly motivated character, alongside matt damon and jodie foster, who give probably the worst performances of their careers. jodie foster is PROFOUNDLY AWKWARD, partly because of a strange accent that she seems to be making up as she goes, and partly because of this faux-politician posturing she infuses into every moment, every movement, every syllable. but yeah, copley creates a kind of magic out of clearly dire conditions for any actor.

the single tone of the movie is unrelenting LOUDNESS, basically waving a gun in your face and saying YOU BETTER FUCKING LOVE THIS SHIT. within the first 10 minutes i was numb. there's no variety. just maximum intensity at all times. the score exemplifies this. it's essentially a bunch of big booms, and it covers at least 70% of the movie.

the visual world is totally believable and entertaining in the same way district 9 was. i marvel at the integration of effects and makeup and whatever else is going on.. it manages to make the movie watchable. if blomkamp understood how to make his characters interesting (which sharlto gets) he could have something truly special again, like d9. not that i want another d9 necessarily. i just want something that lives up to his effects.

[samsong]

it appears as though chris nolan has ruined action movies.  i suspect this is gonna be the first in a long, bloated line of "can you make it like the dark knight/inception?"  stupid slow motion flashbacks involving children, drenched in self seriousness, awful female character(s), a pervasive score that prominently features lower register blasts from the brass section, indecipherable action scenes, it all adds up to who gives a fuck.  even prepared with tempered expectations after reading all the mediocre responses to this movie, it still disappointed.  sharlto copley is great though.  he's clearly a crazy person.

[©brad]

it appears as though chris nolan has ruined action movies.  i suspect this is gonna be the first in a long, bloated line of "can you make it like the dark knight/inception?"  stupid slow motion flashbacks involving children, drenched in self seriousness, awful female character(s), a pervasive score that prominently features lower register blasts from the brass section, indecipherable action scenes, it all adds up to who gives a fuck.  even prepared with tempered expectations after reading all the mediocre responses to this movie, it still disappointed.  sharlto copley is great though.  he's clearly a crazy person.

Yes.

[jenkins]

toasted

pubrick are you still going? i might miss it under a skip

[Pubrick]

this was not bad.



i'm serious. i went in there so excited to see a hilarious trainwreck but it was nowhere near as catastrophic as picolbug made it out to be.

fair points:
- it's stupid that she didn't know if the president had kids, jodie foster's entire performance is deserving of a 7 year suspension from acting in any medium.
- it's stupid that he went into the thing that gave him a lethal dose of radiation. it's also stupid that he was joking with the police robot.

i don't think it's stupid to send a bunch of illegal ships to elysium. this is where i think we have different opinions on the logic of the film. one of those ships actually made it. they don't want to live on elysium they just want to lie on that magic bed for a little bit, and that was achieved wasn't it? that makes it worth the risk.

point you didn't make but i would not have accepted: it's stupid that the awesome technology of elysium is not distributed in the world. this is because the premise of the movie is heavy handed as fuck. almost everything that's stupid in the film can be put down to the literal premise that the upper class people are literally UP and the poor people are DOWN.

this is so obvious it's embarrassing, but it's an acceptable trope that i will have to expand on in the thread that is yet to exist. the way the film deals with it is perhaps overly optimistic, but even its most ridiculous aspects have some counterparts in real life which actually justify a lot of the nonsense. OBVIOUSLY the film has really strong correlations with modern plight of refugees. i'm left wondering after the film if what didn't make sense is really the fault of the film's logic or just a reflection of illogical situations in our own world.

the fault the film has is not giving a convincingly complex picture of the future world where these kinds of decisions (sending illegal ships to elysium) would make sense. if you take the whole thing as a giant allegory for a real life political (global) situation, then it's just as logical as District 9 was.

i managed to even have a fruitful discussion about human rights and the role of first world countries after watching this film with a friend. it's not as good as District 9 because it aims too high, and no one really wanted to comment too much on that film's literal geopolitical connotations, the best we got were some irate Nigerians that no one gave a shit about. it's sloppy, and jodie foster gives the worst performance of the century, but it makes sense in its own LOUD way.

i wonder if the cynicism against the film lies purely in its execution, or more against its heart-on-its-sleeve Heal The World message. i wonder if we give more credit to impenetrable shit like INLAND EMPIRE or Upsteam Color (which is great but aesthetically grating, and come on the performances were sometimes worse than Jodie Foster). I wonder if movies that are so well made, technically, as Elysium are somehow treated more harshly for having their ideas so clearly exposed.. because there is nowhere to hide when your film doesn't look like total shit.

i wonder if sometimes we hate things because they communicate imperfection in an imperfect way, when ambiguity is not shown clearly. i can forgive things like that. flaws in films are sometimes as lovable as flaws in the real world.