Pass the Popcorn review

Rating: 6/10 (24 August 2013)

I saw Matt Damon's newest movie – Elysium. I had great expectations, and I was curious to see this movie since it was directed and written by District 9′s director and writer Neill Blomkamp. Elysium reminds very much of that awesome movie and it has an interesting story and a good cast, so I think it was natural to suppose, and hope, that Elysium would have been District 9′s worthy successor. Unfortunately, this movie was a pretty big disappointment – and even if you decide to ignore the existence of District 9 and don't compare the two, it remains a bad movie. Also, I would have loved to see Ninja of Die Antwoord play the main role, but he turned the director's offer down.
Matt Damon plays Max, a young man living on Earth in the year 2154: our planet is polluted, unsafe, filled with criminals and poor people who hope to one day get to Elysium, a man-made space station where all the wealthy people of Earth have moved and where they can live forever thanks to special medical machines. The rich would do anything to stop the poor from getting to Elysium, and the poor just want to get there in order to be cured. After Max is injured at work and has only five days left to live, he joins a group of criminals who attach an exoskeleton to his body and send him on a mission to steal some data from a rich person, and afterwards go to Elysium.
First of all, the movie looks great. But let's not emphasise this: it's supposed to look impressive and have great visual effects, it's a sci-fi with a $115 million budget! Also, while there are some good scenes that manage to keep you interested, others look like a video game. Then we have the story. As I said, it's interesting, mainly because you have so much possibilities and you can exploit it in so many ways: you can show the sociological aspect of the situation presented in the movie, you can analyse the characters psychologically, or describe the class wars between the rich and the poor so we can understand how things happened before the rich went to Elysium and we can sympathise with the poor. The director did nothing of this. Instead, he just showed us – this is Earth and it's ugly and it's really sad, this is Elysium and it's nice but the people are evil. It's a pity, since Blomkamp wanted the movie to send a powerful message and to be a metaphor for today's society. Yes, we get the metaphor, but it's faintly delivered and it makes Elysium look like just another silly Hollywood sci-fi trying to be all smart and stuff (Oblivion much?).
Regarding the acting, Matt Damon and Jodie Foster were good, but their characters were too undeveloped. Especially Foster's role as the movie's antagonist, the Minister of Homeland Security Delacourt, should have gotten more attention, if not more screen time. Blomkamp could have just taken the hint from Foster's last name. Matt Damon, on the other hand, is constantly present, in almost every scene of the movie, so he manages to be a bit more developed. But there's his childhood friend Frey, decently played by Alice Braga, whom we should believe he loves and cares for, even though they haven't seen each other in years, and she has a child with another man (that we never meet). Their zero-chemistry relationship is just taken for granted in the script, and consequently, we can't care. Perhaps the worst characteristic of this movie is that's it's so damn long, it gets so boring and still manages to leave some things unexplained. I guess we can just hope Blomkamp will create something better the next time.
Rating: 6/10 Read more at passpopcorn.wordpress.com