Elysium (2013)

Film: Elysium (2013)
Stars: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Diego Luna
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

It gives me no pleasure in subscribing to a cliche.  I don't enjoy speaking them, I don't enjoy them in my movies (or my television, as any review on this site would attest).  I don't enjoy them in particular in real life, and people exchange them a thousand times a day, so that's quite infuriating.  So when I realized that Neill Blomkamp, who made the devastatingly effective District 9 four years ago, had fallen into the sophomore slump, I hung my head knowing that I was going to have to deride a man who has fallen into the same trap that many before him have ventured, and I was going to do so without the benefit of a critical consensus against the film.

(Spoilers ahead)The movie is about a "futuristic" society where the world is overheated, overrun, excessively polluted, and the rich control everything.  Basically it's exactly the same as today, except we got slightly more advanced on our medicinal and scientific research instead of watching the media parcel through political gaffes (I'm in a mood with Congress right now, and the "let's treat everything and cure nothing" aspect of the powers that be in the world, whether that be the broken education system, the lack of funding for science, the medical community's shift to creating chronic diseases instead of curing them, or any number of other topics...but that's a thought for another post, as there's plenty in Elysium to complain about without getting into the world at large).

The film chronicles how people on Earth work in horrific conditions, and the lower classes (presumably the bulk of the human population, as Elysium doesn't look large enough to house much more than a few hundred thousand people at most) are left to die without hardly any medical care.  Society has been overrun, and there's little water or unpolluted air to breath.  The healthcare system is a joke, as well, as Matt Damon's character Max soon learns when he is exposed to radiation poisoning and thus his journey starts, initially out-of-self-interest, but you know that Alice Braga's daughter, who is dying of leukemia, will be the only one who is saved on Elysium.

The film continues with Max shooting and chancing into any number of opportunities, as he figures out a way to rather easily board onto Elysium, all things considered (the place has less protection than a home alarm system), through the assistance of a corrupt Defense Secretary who keeps tripping over herself in a mad quest for power (Foster) and a mercenary who slowly but steadily goes insane in the film (Copley), both of whom are such bungling idiots that they can't actually make any of their schemes work.  They're like Wile E. Coyote they fail so spectacularly and consistently, except far less likable or believable.

Eventually, after Elysium has been taken over and the people of earth have been rewarded with roughly 100 sickbeds (you do the math on how they divide those up amongst 11 billion people), and the movie watches Damon, Copley, and Foster all die violent and in Foster's case, sudden and oddly anticlimactic deaths, the film ends, assuming that at the very least the haves will be joining the have nots in ruin.  I know there are a lot more plot points to mention, but the film's grasp on plot and consistency has made me so angry that I want to get straight into the complaining.

For starters, the film doesn't really make much sense.  It's difficult to imagine that the mercenaries, if they were even remotely good people (as they pretended to be, despite being killers and car thieves) wouldn't have spent some money on getting sick beds to at the very least their own workers (if they can build a ship that can make it to the moon, they can figure out a way to break into one of the factories that make the med beds).  The film is also far too short and filled with far too many plots to need both Foster's power-hungry Defense Secretary and Copley's crazed mercenary as villains.  The film actually seems to almost get bored with Foster's character halfway through the movie, instead deciding that Copley's rogue assassin is the more interesting one (this may have been correct, but the film was structured so that Foster would be the chief protagonist, and it felt horribly disjointed when they started to shift away from her).

I am an enormous fan, as a general rule, of Jodie Foster's, both onscreen as well as offscreen (I like an actor who enjoys their privacy and not playing the paparazzi game, and the Globes speech was just swell, in my opinion).  That caveat said, this is easily the worst performance I've ever seen from Foster...by a considerable margin.  Forget, for starters her accent that no one else on Elysium remotely seems to share (is it French?  Canadian? British? South African? a Conglomerate?  It's hard to say, but whatever it is, it's woefully out-of-place).  Her villain has little to no background, which is partially the script's fault, but also a bit on Foster, who as an actor of considerable clout, could have demanded a bit more rationale behind her character's actions, or at least used her skills to show them through the dialogue.  What is the goal of her power-hungry ambition?  What does she want, except to be President and to shoot down rogue ships?  There was no moment she was onscreen that I enjoyed, except when she glided out during her first scene and I was briefly reminded of Inside Man, and how good that movie was.

Damon is not much better, though everyone is an improvement on Foster's work (rivaling Mila Kunis's performance in Oz for worst performance by a major actor in a film for me this year).  His character coasts on his considerable charm, to the point that he's exhausted.  Is Frey (Braga) his lover, his sister, his only friend?  How are we to believe that he's both completely selfless and yet spends the greater bulk of the first half of the movie (along with his main goals in life) focused entirely on getting a ticket onto Elysium?  Damon's character is so easily and simply sketched, it's hard to imagine that this is the same director who got the sharp, slowly deteriorating performance from Sharlto Copley in District 9?

Honestly, aside from the recurring beautiful shot of Elysium, circling above the planet, I have trouble finding a redeeming factor in the film.  Even the Visual Effects are poorly borrowing from J.J. Abrams and a half-dozen post-apocalyptic films that have come out in recent years.  This is probably the worst movie I've seen so far this year, and will end by saying that intrigue you're feeling from the trailers-let it pass, and go find The Bling Ring or To the Wonder in a dollar theatre and enjoy that instead.