Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

hahaha, I noticed that to but let slide.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

And that is my biggest gripe among other big gripes. The director lacks the vision and ability of how to make the movie a living breathing world. I knew the plot was going to be heavy handed, but I went in hoping to be sucked in by the cinematography and epic largeness of Elysium and the remains of an overpopulated earth. It just comes off as an over budget b-flick.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Clever doesn't always mean good, in the case of D9 it was about 90 minutes too long.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

I saw this yesterday. It looked great, it was mildly entertaining, but the story was <strong>really</strong> stupid.

Not really worth enumerating all the reasons, but here are the top three:

1. A few lines of assembly code magically fixes all of society's problems
2. Apparently no one has the source code to Elysium's systems to undo the changes
3. If the system says you're the president, who is the public (or anyone else) to argue?

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Number 3 can be explained because as we saw at the end, the peace of the planet was kept by robots. Meaning whoever the robots thought was the president, they would protect. I would assume the only way to regain control of the machines was to input another code or destroy them. Remember too the whole point it seems was to gain access to medical supplies which were all controlled by robots.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Well, then at least we know he actually reads!

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

I agree. I was outright laughing by the end. Why do they have fleets of ships with the magic heal machines just ready to go...especially when everybody already has one in their house? It's clear that nothing was thought through, and that the director thought the "message" was more important than plot or characters.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Yea. All that time spent, making it look very real. They should have spent more time and fleshed out the logic behind everything. You can't always expect the viewer to take such large leaps of logic.

Still a cool sci-fi action film. But could have been something much more.

Maybe Blomkamp will be more critical of himself next time around. I think he's talented and will deliver some mind-blowing, epic movie experience one day. But I don't think he's done it yet.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

The U.S. has pretty much a hospital of some sort in every medium to large city. Yet we have hospital ships that are ready to go where there's a need.

Maybe it's a stretch but I'm just trying to think of something comparable... not to give an excuse for the script.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

I really didn't see that many robots 'controlling' Los Angeles. We saw the factories and 2 robots harassing Mexican Matt Damon.

But when they REALLY wanted to find him they only had 4 guys in a chopper look for him? It's like it was a low budget movie that couldn't afford to show robots marching through the streets or running SWAT team raids.

WHERE WERE ALL THE ROBOTS OPPRESSING MANKIND!?! DAMMIT!

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Also, from a pure business perspective it would make sense to have one of those Magical Medical Machines in the factory. Somebody gets hurt, just put them in the machine and get them back on the line within minutes.

Also, why do they have robots doing service jobs (Parole Officer, Cop, Medic) but not working the line at the factory?

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Yep - Job perk / bargaining chip

because it's not cruel enough

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Went to see it with somebody else. Liked it more than I thought I would.

Sharlto :hump:

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

Seen this awhile back. I liked it for the most part but the more I think about it the more I don't like it. I think the biggest thing that bother me was the ending. I wanted to know if Elysium could handle that many new people. I wanted to know what life would be like with a criminal running the place. Just seems like things wouldn't end well in the long run.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

It is ironic that in the beginning, it said Earth is overpopulated blah blah blah. At the end, the magical machine is now available to heal everyone. Wouldn't that exacerbate the problem by a factor of infinity? ;)

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

I finally saw it the other day and I really enjoyed it. But I enjoyed it as an action movie. There are some plot contrivances (it's a lucky coincidence that Matt Damon's plan happened to incur at the exact same time as Jodie Foster's coup), but if you look at it as an action movie where they have to break into location X and get to a MacGuffin, this was flipping amazing. Maybe I'm just releived to see a huge effects summer action movie go for an R-rating, but the atmosphere and direction were top.

Also who could ever guess that the dork from District 9 could play such a terrifying badass villain?


Although I generally agree with the political message, I was afraid this movie was going to be too preachy. District 9 somehow made the message work while still being an effective movie IMO. Elysium's message was much flakier, but aside from the setup and the ending it was easy to disregard in lieu of an excellent actioner.

But yeah, some problems. I get that the message is that the writers want universal healthcare in real life and that's fine. But I didn't buy how in the movie world that the magic healthcare devices are not to be found anywhere on Earth.

Re: Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) — The Reviews Thread
 

While really heavy handed, I thought this was a really solid flick. I found District 9 to be pretty boring and many compared this negatively to D9, so I went in with pretty low expectations. The ending scene was way too on the nose, but the rest of the movie was really entertaining and the visuals were fantastic. There were a few scenes that had me scratching my head as to what Blomkamp was trying to do, but they were few and far apart.

Yeah, actors seem to tend to like villain roles, and Copley was hamming it up like crazy, he was clearly having a blast.