Elysium: I bet the book is better.

Rating: 2/10 (22 August 2013)

Minor spoilers used!
Books are almost always better than movies. They have no real time constraints, they have the best CG in the world (your imagination) and you almost always have more detail.
Elysium was a let down for me. How can people spent 10's or 100's of millions of dollars on a movie and have so many holes? It also reminded me of a Johnny Mnemonic too much, but with out the dolphin.
The visuals of this movie are awesome, but the characters and technology used by the characters were a let down.
Jodie Foster's character was angry all the time, as if she needed to get laid. Her character only had one gear, but then maybe the book gave more depth to the character? Maybe she was cast wrong for this movie?
Matt Damon was good but he didn't have that rough feel to his character. Yeah he had tattoos, but he had an awesome body. Where does a person like him get the time to work out? To make myself ready for this part I would have let myself go a bit. He doesn't look the part of being a "typical Joe turned saved the world hero".
Sharlto Copley played an awesome antagonist. Really. I mean kudos to him on a part well played. He was rough, cruel, psychotic... I was really anticipating his characters death. I really hated his character, as in, "die you SOB die!"
However, I think the death of Kruger (Copley) was weak. Again, I didn't read the book, but tossing him over the edge and having him blow up is, well, "huh?".
I find this the biggest let down of the entire movie. Why work the crowd up in to hating this villain then making his death so impersonal? I was hoping to see Matt Damon's character crush his skull and have his brains pop out.
The technology used was cool, but there were many questions left unanswered (which again I'm sure the book explained):
1) why do doors on Elysium only use 4 digits to lock? 2) why did William Fichtner's character put a "terminal" code in to the download (which was there for the purposes of killing the hero), when it would have killed him also? Wouldn't it have been better to have Matt Damon's character die from a technical malfunction? 3) why is Jodie Foster's character using rockets from the ground to shoot down transports when Elysium was supposed to have its own defense system? And no, no and no to your responses. 4) Why is radiation being used in the assembly of robots? 5) Why is Elysium's scanning Earth at the end? How does it know X number of people need help? Even then, it would take months to figure out the number of sick people rather than seconds.
The list of flaws and bugs goes on and on with this movie making it suck for me; but again the book is probably better.
CG - 1 Direction - 0 Acting - 1 (for Sharlto Copley) Script - 1 Action - 1 Continuity - 0 Use of technology - (-1) The death of Kruger was weak - (-1)
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