Elysium (2013): MOvie Review

Wadda good film – not great, but definitely good. It suffered a little because the awesome Neill Blomkamp was always going to have a tough time following his surprise masterpiece (District 9).  Even so, it was a really good down to earth Sci Fi action movie – though personally, I found it a less subtle than the more mindful blockbuster I was expecting.

The thing about Neill Blomkamps previous film is the obvious apartheid dystopian stuff turned-on-it’s-head approach didn’t work as well with this film.  In District 9 we were expecting a futuristic rant about how racism was bad and we got a bit-of-a-practical-shock.  With this it was more subtle or refined.

Unfortunately it gets to be a bit gun happy, I found myself muttering, ‘nice shootin’ tex’ a couple of times and was concerned that the excellent premise was getting lost in gratuitous gun-play.  Now I like a bit (lot) of gratuitousness, but this was a bit samey and dampened awesomeness of the film.

Jodie Foster is Delacourt, the homeland-security chief of the super-rich was magnificent and (I godda day, quite sexy too). Her job was to keep the riff-raff from gate-busting onto her perfect gated community of the socially well off.

Matt Damon is the poverty-stricken cool ex-awesome dude engaged to fix some Elysium issues for her.

Overall the film was pretty good but could have been better in terms of exploring the difference between the elite and the not so elite. We didn’t know or understand what the life was like on Elysium, we could guess, but there was not much explanation (e.g. why should we have been interested… or not?)

I definitely rate the film, just not as highly as District 9.