Film Review - Elysium (2013)

Elysium is the new film from the writer and director of District 9 Neil Blompkamp and the story here concerns the world's richest building a paradise space station in space to preserve their way of life from the ruins of the Earth, on this deserted world we meet Max (Matt Damon) a factory worker who may hold the key to mankind's salvation.

I went into Elysium with very mixed expectations as while I really enjoyed District 9, the previews for this film made me cringe in a very bad way, playing out like a bad class warfare of rich vs. poor in the future Ughh, give me a fucking break, I did however become more hopeful that this was simply bad advertising and that the film itself would deliver the goods, would this be the case?

Sadly not as quite frankly this movie was pathetic for reasons I will now list in more detail:

Firstly the tone of this movie is all over the place, parts of it play out as very serious, parts of it are very violent, parts of it play out as laughable and parts of it also border on being cartoonish, there is no real sense of a consistent tone to the film and its storyline which I found to be that heavy handed that I just sat there bored for the most part and walking out of the cinema with a long face thinking "This was from the same man that made District 9, pathetic"

The second point is the performances which again are all over the place, Alice Braga stands out as Frey but the rest are nowhere near as good, Damon is a bore in the lead and it made me think that anyone else could've done this part hell Idris Elba would've been a better fit which left me baffled the more I thought about it, Foster is simply wasted in her role and Copley goes so far over the top I just started laughing at him whenever he spoke, he reminded me a lot of those guest star MAD agents from Inspector Gadget like Presto Chango and The Clockmaker hell based on this performance Copley could've played the Clockmaker in an Inspector Gadget reboot.

But lastly this movie also fails at having exciting action sequences as all of them are filmed and edited in a way that makes you think it was all done in a blender as they are so frantic to watch that you lose track of who's fighting who in what space whenever this happens and as a result it severly weakens the film as a whole.

There were however two things I did like about this film aside from Braga's performance and that was the visual style and the musical score, the visuals in this film are very well done and make you believe that these worlds really exist and the music underscores the film's events nicely and lend some sort of life to them that otherwise doesn't exist.

And so it pains me to have to say this but Elysium is not worth your time and money, the film is all over the place in terms of its storyline, performances and action to be worth recommending and frankly, I expected something better than this from the man that made District 9 and as a result it's a real letdown, 1.5 out of 5.