Elysium

[cinemabon]

“Elysium” directed by Neill Blomkamp

The good news for fans of the science fiction genre is that there is a new film that doesn’t involve someone with super powers – well, not exactly. The movie is exciting, a fun thrill ride and has a moral movie message to go along with all of the bloodletting. Director Neill Blomkamp is showing us another apocryphal vision of the future full of crowded cities, lots of pollution, and rampant crime. Its wealthy citizens have created an oasis in space – a Stanford torus – a wheeled space station meant to simulate Earth’s environment by rotating at a certain speed to simulate gravity. The special effects are dazzling. The story is cut fast. The action is non-stop and the message is very simple with a moral ending that is bound to bring smiles. If you are a fan of science fiction then this movie is the best offering of the year to date.

That said – I have a laundry list of problems with “Elysium” starting with the basic plot and going on from there with major problems around its credibility at the core of its “science” fiction.

Praise first: Matt Damon does not disappoint in this movie. His acting is top notch. He gives it his all and then some as a man stricken with poison after an industrial accident. However, Blomkamp practically pushes Damon from one scene to the next, hardly giving him time to emote. Most of the time Matt is just angry about his lot in life. The flash back sequences are meant to stir emotion in us for Max (Damon) and what fate has delivered for him. Raised by nuns in an orphanage, Max’s childhood friend, Frey (Alice Braga) and he stare up at the sky every day and envision what life would be like living on Elysium – visible day and night from Earth.

The special effects are outstanding, especially those that involve Elysium – a Stanford torus, whose idea was developed into living communities for NASA back in the 1960’s as a possible step after the Apollo program. Although it never left the drawing board, the designs from them nearly duplicate the sets and look of Elysium right down to the architecture of “futuristic” abodes for its residents. Editors Julian Clarke and Lee Smith have cut the film so fast that we hardly have time to glimpse anything (leave that for the DVD, right?). But this is an action movie so the cutting should be fast, I suppose. Still, only Kubrick would give us time to drink in the beauty of this revolving giant structure that Art Director Don Macaulay has so painstakingly took to accurately design and ILM so generously put into three dimensions with all of the flourishes one would expect a top notch special effects company to produce. Every kind of detail is visible to see, if Blomkamp would only leave the shot on long enough to enjoy. The camera work on planet Earth is nothing to sneeze at. Cinematographer Trent Opaloch’s lens is so bouncy you feel like you’re watching the movie from the back of a pick up truck.

However, all is not so joyous with the movie “Elysium,” starting with the script that Neill Blomkamp wrote. We have a smattering of “Wall-E” with Earth being reduced to a garbage dump. L.A. has become one big giant slum that stretches out into infinity (I guess they at least solved that global warming thing. Otherwise, LA basin would be under water). Throw in a few shakes of every apocryphal forecast ever made for the future of humanity – overcrowding, pollution, crime, lack of government or civilization – from “Mad Max” to you name it – this them has been done in science fiction many, many, many times. Then we come to the science part – that’s the plausible stuff that supposed to appeal to geeks like me. Well, the dreamy-eyed ones will go gaga for the space station alright. But no one will understand how something so gargantuan ever came to be built in the first place. Based on its scale, no amount valuables – and I mean no amount – could ever pay for something this big. So that is a leap of faith to fathom from the start. It would take technicians working in space a hundred years just to build a thing that large. And it would take a workforce of millions to operate it (the population of Elysium is around 150,000 or so). They assume that robot technology is so advanced that robots are doing everything, while people are slaving away in factories making robots for the rich. Glad machines that complex never break down or wear out. Elysium citizen: “Hey, my robot stopped working! Where’s Geek Squad?”

Not since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Total Recall” have we seen a science fiction film with this much violence, especially where the main character (Max, as in mad) doles it out left and right with rapid fire guns and wearing a head-ripping exoskeleton suit – oh, yeah, I guess that does give him super powers; aka Tony Stark.

The villains – there are two – are the standard Hollywood fare these days. They never die unless you explode them. They just keep coming back again and again until you get sick of them being resurrected from what should have been the death blow a hundred times over. Jodie Foster (save the best for last) is completely wasted here. You could have had Kim Kardashian play the role. It requires only that an actress show no emotion and speak her lines with terse delivery. Any pretty face could have done it. So, producers – save your money next time and buy any young model to do that part. Foster – who was so brilliant in “Contact” (one of my favorite science fiction films of all time) – does nothing in this film except walk from scene to scene speaking French with a terrible accent (you’ve got to Meryl Streep-it up a little, Jodie).

In conclusion, “Elysium” is a story about a terrible future with no hope except that if the rich have it all, we can convince some Mexicans to help us take it back from them. End of story. Recommended for the cool science fiction pictures in space on the big screen, and not much else.

[oscar jubis]

It's fair to have high expectations after District 9....

[cinemabon]

Todd McCarthy's review was not too flattering, but the rest of the comments have been positive. I never saw "District 9" but my son raved about it. We'll see...

[Chris Knipp]

It's fair to have high expectations after District 9....

It's always fair (nice?) to have high expectations, high hopes anyway. Not sure they're justified in this case. DISTRICT 9 was a crude mess. See my review (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2635-DISTRICT-9-%28Neill-Blomkamp-2009%29). Johann saw it and liked some things but called (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2635-DISTRICT-9-%28Neill-Blomkamp-2009%29&p=22679#post22679)it "a ridiculous movie." See Armond White's even stronger condemnation in his New York Press review. (http://nypress.com/from-mothership-to-bullship/) It was roundly attacked, because there was a wave of critical applause for Blomkamp's low-budget debut. Well, it got great publicity and now he has another one which at least we can be sure is better funded. And he's got Matt Damon, a sophisticated actor who lends credibility. But he's been involved in his fair share of clinkers too. Ditto Jodie Foster. I try to avoid watching trailers but I was conned into seeing this one and this time I see Blomkamp has opted for a tidy, clean kind of sci-fi movie, or at least the "Elysium" part is. He may mainly be interested in the mess on earth. Messes are his thing. It looks pretty bloody noisy -- much the same as the usual American blockbuster actioner. Welcome to the club, Neill! For that name you might recall Schiller's "Ode to Joy" in the final passage of Beethoven's Ninth:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
daughter from Elysium

Listen, I don't know German! But I know my Beethoven. And that's the opening of the crowning passage of one of the most sublime compositions in western music, so when I hear "Elysium" I think of it.

Plus there's Paris: the Champs Elysées, the "Elysian Fields."

[cinemabon]

"I know a little German... he's right over there!" (up pops a midget) Lucy Gutteridge as Hillary Flammond in "Top Secret."

I never build up expectations anymore. I've been jilted at the altar too many times. Open eyes, gentlemen, open eyes (and perhaps mind, too).

[Chris Knipp]

The TOP SECRET line brought a smile. :) I fear Herr Blomkamp is working with very familiar material here. But I don't like to see Matt Damon bomb, so I hope for some success.

[Johann]

The line from Top Secret is "He's sitting over there".
And he doesn't "pop up". He's just sitting there. And he waves.
Remember your lines cinemabon...remember your lines...that's the reason Kubrick did so many takes.
Actors don't know their lines!

[cinemabon]

"And it is a moron who gives advice to a horse's ass!" Graham Stark as the waiter in "Victor, Victoria"

[Chris Knipp]

Bravo, Johann! I'm impressed. Points were gained.

[cinemabon]

Then why did Wyler do so many takes? (far more than Kubrick and his films won far more awards than Kubrick's did) Not because of lines, because of realism - make it real, Johann, make it real.

[Chris Knipp]

Is this the movie you're referrin to? YouTUbe video. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0lJyDCLYTE) As a YouTube commenter explains:
The waiter's line is Yiddish, not German: "Gei kaken oifen yam" (spelling varies). It's an insult, and it means roughly "Go sh*t in the ocean." I know the phrase from a friend who taught it to me in college. You see I didn't go to college for nothing.

[cinemabon]

Ah, HA! See? He does pop up! (and waves) but the line is "He's sitting over there." I've seen that movie a dozen times and only recognized some of the Yiddish. I had no idea the waiter was speaking in Yiddish, too! LOL! I'll have to get out my DVD and watch it again. I love a good pun. What all this has to do with Elysium, I have no idea.

[Chris Knipp]

What it has to do with Elysium is that I quoted the lines from Shiller's poem used in the very famous opening to the "Ode to Joy" finale of Beethoven's Ninth, which has the phrase "daughter from Elysium." And I said I don't know German but I know my Beethoven.

[tabuno]

I agree with Chris on this one. I reviewed my comments about District 9 and they were pretty scary and not in a good way.

[cinemabon]

I edited my first post and put Elysium at the top

[Johann]

cinemabon- Wyler is a great director but he's no Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick never won any awards (only one Oscar and a DGA Griffith award) because his talent was not recognized. Nobody knew what to do with him.

And as for kepping it real, Kubrick actually said: Real is good, INTERESTING is better.

[cinemabon]

Wyler worked within the system. Kubrick thought outside the box. I know what you wanted to say. Of the two directors, I love them equally and admire them both. But lets stick to "Elysium" on this blog, ok?

[tabuno]

Cinemabon has really delivered a wonderful movie review about Elysium. While I really wanted to jump on it, it provided both great summary information, great observations with explanations, and it elicited a great desire to see this movie to chomp of some of his comments. But I have to admit that regardless of how I feel about some of his observations, what and how he writes about Elysium is really outstanding.

[Chris Knipp]

Neill Blomkamp: Elysium (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/links/0l9.jpg
DIEGO LUNA, MATT DAMON AND WAGNER MOURA IN ELYSIUM

The future is a hell of a mess

In the movie world of the South African director Neill Blomkamp, whose 2009 District 9 was a surprise hit that got four Oscar nominations, the future, clearly, is dystopian. Actually, it's a huge social and political nightmare where whatever injustices we suffer have been brutally magnified. In District 9, aliens ironically marooned in South Africa (where Blomkamp hails from) were kept penned up in impoverished shantytowns very much like that country's apartheid townships. In Blomkamp's new movie (with five times the budget of his first), LA, by part-for-the-whole logic presumably representing the whole planet, is one vast favela, a teeming slum. Even little Max (Maxwell Perry Cotton) and his childhood girlfriend Frey (Valentina Giron), who will grow up to be Matt Damon and Alice Braga (of City of God), speak Spanish, and need a bath. Hovering over them is the place where everybody would rather be, a circular man-made satellite that from a distance looks rather like the Mercedes Benz logo. It's called Elysium, which sounds like a posh housing development, and in fact it's like a large gated community. It's where the rich and fortunate live. We don't learn much more about it except that the big houses, with their pools and their lawns, are each equipped with what's called a Medipod, which looks like a domed tanning bed, but frees whoever lies inside it from all illness and physical damage. Healthcare down on earth sucks. It's not a pleasant situation, and Elysium is not a pleasant movie. It's loud, violent, dirty, and cruel. It's not remotely believable and it's no fun. It does provide Matt Damon with a heroic role, and Jodie Foster with a villainous one. If you insist on watching, look for a small-screen cinema and sit toward the back. It's an ear-splitting, jittery movie.

Blomkamp, who both directed and wrote the plot-hole-ridden screenplay, still has an eagerness and hunger to him. There is an edge to the action scenes. Damon must have welcomed the challenge. He has to go around shaven-headed and tattooed, dying of radiation sickness and loaded down with mechanical assist machinery that's attached directly to his bones. Jodie Foster, who goes by the moniker Delacourt, is a real ice queen. She speaks French (more haughty than Spanish) and is in charge of security for Ellysium, but bent on world, or at least satellite, domination for herself. The whole setup reminds me of Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, where if I recall the enforcer-lady sitting at glittering computer consoles is called Julia and played by Andrea Riseborough. The planet there, as in After Earth, had gone further downhill. That's three dystopia movies just in the past five months. There may be more. I wonder how people keep track of them.*

Elysium may in its way be the most memorable of these three; it's certainly more "angry and alive" (Anthony Lane's words (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/08/12/130812crci_cinema_lane)). But while District 9 was crude and preposterous, it had a specificity and depth of character development Elysium lacks. We never get to know any of the fancy people who live on Elysium. Blomkamp makes the mistake of many sci-fi movies: he spends most of our time between worlds rather than in one. He also manipulates simple cliches -- with zero sense of humor. There's the setup where the child Max is told by his benevolent Latina convent nanny that he's destined for greatness, a moment rerun near the end to tell us he's gotten there. We may need that because his success looks a lot like failure. How granting everybody in LA (or on earth?) affordable (and sci-fi perfect) health care will solve their myriad social problems is moot. Blomkamp (Lane again) "remains more gripped by setup than by resolution."

Indeed the most memorable scenes are of Max early on. A former car thief on parole, he's gone straight and ironically works on a factory line making the brutal robots that function as the town's (planet's?) policemen. When they haul him unjustifiably before a parole officer, he (that) too is a robot, but painted like an old-fashioned doll. His mean factory boss (Blomkamp is nothing if not unsubtle) forces him into a dangerous zone of the factory where he gets a dose of radiation that gives him five days to live. It's then that he calls on his soulful old pal Julio (Diego Luna) and his old criminal cohort Spider (Wagner Moura) for help in getting to Ellysium and diving into a Medipod to have his life back. Who should be linked back up with him right around this time but his long-lost girlfriend Frey (Braga), now a nurse supplied with a cute, sad young daughter (Matilda: Emma Tremblay) dying of leukemia. Her only hope too is a Medipod. And of course there are some super-baddies, rogue hirelings of Delacourt from South Africa, led by Kruger (Sharlto Copley), whose high-pitched accent casts him for most of us as the most alien critter on screen. There's a higher-level white collar baddie, John Carlyle (William Fichtner), inside whose loathsome head are embedded all the computer codes of Elysim, which Spider wants to get downloaded to Max's brain so he can open up the closed world up above. Call it benign world-domination. Maybe.

Spider is a grubby madman who inhabits a graffitti-filled warehouse full of computer screens, exemplifying the usual assumption of dystopian sci-fi films that in future-world, hi-tech sophistication easily coexists with every other kind of physical degradation -- and total mess. As Spider, Moura sputters and raves almost incomprehensibly. He's behind Max's being fitted with the elaborate mechanical-encrusted-on-the-human gadgetry that miraculously is able to turn him from a man totally enfeebled by radiation sickness into a superhero. "Will it hurt?" he asks before this far-fetched retrofit. Yes, it will. But somehow while Max screams with pain at lots of other times (howls that harmonize with the movie's wealth of F-words), he's quiet for this operation, drilling into the bone and all, and it does its job. He's good to go.

I wasn't. I couldn't buy Damon in this role, or Foster, or Braga, or least of all the campy overacting Copley. I liked Diego Luna, and was glad to see him back again, however briefly. But that wasn't enough to get me through this movie in any comfort. I give Blomcamp credit for inflicting authentic pain -- to the viewer. And it's clear that despite the haze created by all the extra money he had this time, which of course means lots of CGI and niftier robots, Blomcamp still cares about what he's doing. It didn't work for me, though.

Elysium was released in the US 9 August 2013; UK, 21 August.

______________________
*I forgot World War Z.

[cinemabon]

Go back and seek your "Ellysium" copy and replace it with "Elysium" (proper spelling for this film)

You kept mentioning "most memorable" as if you were searching back through your memory, Chris, and reaching for some flotsam to pull you from the quagmire of this quicksand movie. I was surprised you didn't find Damon in his one big shirtless scene at the beginning "memorable."

I couldn't agree with you more that Blomkamp is more concerned with set up than resolution. The convoluted plot kept skipping around from reason to the next for how and why Max would make it to Elysium (which he finally does but only through the one dimensional villain Aussie Sharlto Copley as Kruger (or as that Kroger).

Didn't you think it odd that Damon was the only non-Latino in LA? And if he was raised there, his Spanish/Mexican slang would be much better than the terrible mangled Spanish lines he uttered (sort of like Foster's French). No matter how much dirt you throw on "pretty boy" Damon, he looks a hellva lot better than the rest of the LA workers did.

[Chris Knipp]

Ha ha, yes, Matt does look buff in that shot. I called the film "memorable" because I think it delivers a more visceral impression. I really was sickened and made uncomfortable, early on. Does not mean I think it's a good movie, and perversely, since I (like famously Armond White, who was attacked for his brutal review) cordially disliked DISTRICT 9, in now seems more authentic and original than this $115 million movie vs. that $30 million one; I guess that's four times, not five as I wrote.

I now realize that the people on Earth (or in LA, it's never clear which) trying to get to Elysium -- thanks for pointing out the misspelling -- is also a reference to border enforcement against Mexicans; this is pointed out by an online image of the animatronic doll parole officer as a border patrol officer reviewing citizenship applications.

http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/8427/q5n9.jpg

Maybe Damon's Spanish is mediocre and not idiomatic, as you say (I wouldn't know), but Jodie Foster is fluent in French. So much so she has acted in two French films and dubs most of her roles in her films for the French versions. French Wikipedia says she speaks "un français parfait et sans aucun accent." It sounds that way to me, and did in her part in A Very Long Engagement. It stunned me in that film how good her French was, and it's equally convincing here.

"Damon, he looks a hellva lot better than the rest of the LA workers did." Yes, I kind of see what you mean. I see now that Blomkamp wanted to have Eminem for the role. He, at least, is working class.

In your review, aren't you confusing or conflating "apocryphal" (of dubious authenticity, erroneous or fictitious) with "apocalyptic" (forecasting the ultimate destiny of the world; involving or portending widespread devastation...etc.)? Also Sharlto Copley is not an Aussie but like Blomkamp a South African, and a friend who was his star in District 9.

[cinemabon]

I did mix my adjectives and mean the later and not the former.

If anyone knows their French, you do. Perhaps it was her casual delivery that threw me. The fact they glossed over taking many wealthy people from Europe in the film (scenes cut from theatrical version) - original screenplay had most of the places on Elysium going to Europeans to the exclusion of those from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. How they could leave out 2/3 of the world population and build the thing defies reason.

My son liked "District 9" and encouraged me to see "Elysium." I would have been content to just look at the big wheel in space for two hours, with multiple shots and classical music playing in the background - 5 stars! Greatest movie ever made! Alas, Blomkamp came down to Earth.

BTW - speaking to a friend of mine (an astrophysicist) - he said the Stanford Torus (Elysium) would have to be at least 50,000 miles from the planet in order to maintain a stationary orbit. Otherwise, he said that if it was any closer, it would fall toward the planet and burn up (making a big mess) and any further away it would drift toward the moon (again, very messy). At 50,000 miles away, a spacecraft taking off from the planet (assuming it had enough power to achieve escape velocity of 14,000 mph) would need to keep accelerating in order to reach Elysium. "The problem is stopping at that speed when you are approaching a stationary object," he told me. "You'd have to start slowing half way there, in which case it would take hours - not minutes or seconds - to reach Elysium. Ordinarily, a spacecraft would need to circle the planet to approach the space station and match velocities. Shooting a 'bullet/rocket/spacecraft' straight at the station from Earth," he said, "goes against the laws of physics."

Oh, those scientists and their facts, always getting in the way.

[Chris Knipp]

I would have been content to just look at the big wheel in space for two hours, with multiple shots and classical music playing in the background - 5 stars!

But doesn't that sound just a bit like something Kubrick did much better in 2001?


he said the Standford Torus (Elysium) would have to be at least 50,000 miles from the planet in order to maintain a stationary orbit. Otherwise, he said that if it was any closer, it would fall toward the planet and burn up (making a big mess)

This was the same factual flaw that seriously marred ANOTHER EARTH (http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1851), whose screenplay setup i found silly, though many loved it, and it does have memorable everyday psychological on-earth details. This kind of problem comes up in Von Trier's MELCNCHOLIA, but the other planet's proximity is correctly seen as dire in in his film.

I think I did not post my review of ANOTHER EARTH on Filmleaf because tabuno liked it a lot and I didn't want to put a damper on it. But I've linked to my review above.

The scenario of ELYSIUM is full of holes, as I mentioned.

[Johann]

I'll stick to Elysium, but I must add that Kubrick worked within the system just like Wyler, and vowed after Spartacus to never have his creative control hampered again. And he didn't. "How did they ever make a movie of LOLITA?"

Elysium looks much better than District 9. The ante has been upped by Neil B. But is it enough? Is it a new franchise or series worth investing in? My radar is telling me that James Cameron beat Elysium to the punch a long time ago.
What's here that we haven't seen before? Why should I go to a theatre?

[cinemabon]

No one has to point out the obvious to someone who fell in love with Kubrick when he saw "2001" at the Cinestage in Chicago in 1968 in 70mm! Ok? I made the reference on purpose. I WAS content to look at a space station turning to the Blue Danube... and I would have here as well. But we didn't get that. We got "Total Recall" crossed with the "District 9" without the aliens and absent all the science that Kubrick sought through his partnership with Clarke. It was Clarke who said (during the planning phases) you can't do this and you can't do that because this is how things work in space. No film since "2001" has had the same sense of realism and no one ever will as long as they follow the "Star Wars" book of how things work in space. There are no sounds in space, so you can't hear space ships sound like jet engines. There is a thing call forward momentum which is really difficult to stop when there is no friction. I can go on and on like this all day.

As a writer of science fiction (my series was just picked up) I admire great science fiction filmmaking and story telling. But if you are striving for realism (and Star Wars is a fantasy and that's ok) - and in this film they are striving toward future prediction stuff - then you have to follow the book of rules and use science and not fantasy as your guide. When you throw out the science in trying to make it real, there's goes the baby!

[Chris Knipp]

Congratulations on getting your sci-fi series picked up, cinemabon! I hope you make lots of money. And earn many readers.

I did not mean to "point out" anything to you, c. I was just saying, didn't Kubrick do that better? As for science, it's hit or miss, isn't it? To begin with it's fantasy and science fiction. And even pure science fiction is science fiction. It cannot be real science because we cannot predict what the future will be like. Some ideas in the movie are interesting and relate to current developments, like exoskeletons, for example, robots doing menial jobs (god help us).

Re. the proximity of the satellite, I don't guess you saw ANOTHER EARTH, but then I wouldn't bother. I would bother to see MELANCHOLIA. That's brilliance. Perhaps Blomkamp is more interested in his social commentary.

Yes, Johann, ELYSIUM looks better than DISTRICT 9 -- mainly because it had many times the budget. But with a smaller budget comes more ingenuity, arguably more imagination. DISTRICT 9 was overrated but it has a vividness that in ELYSIUM is replaced by mere sheer loudness, violence, annoyingness. I made a mistake going to see it in iMax. My ears hurt and I needed Dramamine.

[tabuno]

It appears that director Neill Blomkamp has found a much more even and polished sci fi thriller in Elysium than his last disappointing turn as director in District 9 (2009). In Elysium there is a believable tragic hero portrayed by Matt Damon and a consistently cold, underplayed Secretary of Defense played by a now older looking Jodie Foster (interestingly with some overtones to former Secretary of Defense Hillary Clinton’s own physical transformation over time). Like Crash (2004), the audience is immersed into a politically charged topics of health care and immigration which strike deep chords of discontent for those who can appreciate the current political state of the United States. What’s rather ominous at the same time breathtaking is the possibility that some of the slum footage in Elysium may be just at outgrowth of real actual location shots around this planet that would only heighten the deepening visual reality blurring both our present sociological tragedy wrought by the frightening magnifying class divisions facing world today and what it is likely to become in the near future.

Neill Blomkamp has avoided the wasted pseudo-docu style of District 9 and The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverleaf (2008), incorporated a judicious use of rich flashbacks, and created a emotionally resonating straight forward storyline, almost potentially mythical in its origins for future generations of this mythical future scenario. Unlike the logical flaws found in District 9, Elysium only once glosses over its technically intact storyline for laypeople. The one glaring problem is the ease by which one the Elysium-bound ships conveniently slips into Elysium airspace. Blomkamp retains justifiably the rich and sweeping visual design of the movie while including a politically and personally potent story. The only slight dissonance is the script outline that involves the coup plot that interestingly has some overtones to the current plight in Egypt. Even more interestingly is the resemblance of this movie to the core outline to Demolition Man (1993), except without the mesmerizing future talk or even the more recent Upside Down (2013) and has the similar emotive power of human perseverance and hardship as Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006) or a less than epic version of Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990). Other class movies would include Gattaca (1997), Fahrenheit 451 (1966). As starkly rich as THX-1138 (1971) was Elysium is as messy and chaotically amazing, echoing the horrors of today’s slums and governmental insensitivity around the world and here at home.

Overall, this movie is an engaging and personally riveting movie, a great reminder for those of the mass audience to reflect on the current state of affairs in the United States and resonates with the anger and frustration that the masses are experiencing at the hands of those who have the power and control. It holds out both moral outrage and a tenuous glimmer of hope for the rest of us or perhaps its just a salve to keep us in our places.

[Chris Knipp]

Yes and it's still a suprisingly ham-handed and ordinary picture, despite the leftist political slant. I agree with the Metacritic ratings: it's in the middle of the summer's sci-fi movies, better than OBLIVION and AFTER EARTH but a notch below WORLD WAR Z and two notches below EUROPA REPORT. I think if you hadn't started off on the wrong foot in watching EUROPA REPORT and gotten convinced it was confusing you'd have seen that it's superior. ELYSIUM is just noisy and flashy. It's not by any stretch a better movie.

[tabuno]

It's interesting how Europa Report (2013) set up somehow materially differs from the flashback presentation of Touching The Void (2003) which was a powerful and engaging movie, but interestingly enough that movie was a dramatization of the real life event as opposed to Europa Report. I am open to the possibility that my distaste for flashbacks unless judiciously used and well thought out and appropriately done for the most effect might have really altered my experience of Europa Report. I found the flashbacks of Elysium (2013) much more effectively used than the overwhelming, pervasive use in Europa Report. Even somehow The Blair Witch Project (1999) use of the flashbacks really was done effectively. But in that case there was little in the way of continued distractions from present and past footage, allowing the flow of the movie to be captured and absorbed as if one was there with the characters themselves. This doesn't happen in Europa Report. At one moment we are jerked back into the past, then forward to the future, a lot of psycho-babble and pseudo-intellectual existentialism being thrown out into the audience and then back into the past and so forth. A really jarring and in my mind unnecessary film techique. still feel that a straight forward narrative would have allowed more audience members to just enjoy the movie experience. But, Chris, you may be right. It will take me until this movie comes to Netflix for me to watch in again out of curiosity to taste your theory.

I would hazard the hypothesis that just as Chris points out my bias with flashbacks, I can't but believe that Chris's politics might not influence how he perceives Elysium. His commentary seems to suggest an emotional distaste for the theme of the movie which can easily color one's experience of the movie.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, I wish you had put this on your or my EUROPA REPORT thread, but really, nearly all EUROPA REPORT is in a sense a "flashback." I'm not sure, though, that found footage really qualifies as "flashback," because found footage is designed to place a certain moment in the constant present of the film. The flashbacks of ELYSIUM, by which you mean the childhood scenes of Max and Frey and their foster caretaker or orphanage mom, are very limited and conventional. I would say they're unnecessary, whereas the found footage part of EUROPA REPORT[i]is]/i] the film; it would not exist without it. It's almost as if the present-day sequences, always rather brief, of people reporting on the mission, are the "flashbacks," because they're a looking-back.