Reviewing Elysium Without Having Seen It

I’m going to make this short and sweet. One–I think Elysium is going to be good. Not great, but good. Its director, Neill Blomkamp, was the force behind District 9, a very engaging sci-fi film with sociopolitical (smart person word!) overtones. Elysium sounds exactly like D9 except, instead of becoming an insect, Matt Damon is bestowed with an armor exoskeleton…exactly like that of an insect. Now that I think about it, Blomkamp might be the biggest one-note since Scorsese.

Two–The “vision of the future” portrayed in the film isn’t all that futuristic. It’s a world where the poor work in squalid conditions for nothing while the rich live far away from them in a pastoral paradise, able to pay for amazing medical care that affords them much longer lifespans. The film could have spiced footage of life in Malibu with footage of life in Detroit and the contrast would have been less marked.

Three–The one crappy thing about Elysium that I know will suck me out of the is the lame “armor” Matt Damon has implanted to gain superpowers. (Click here for a photo of it. No, I promise I’m not surreptitiously linking you to a photo of an echnida’s four-headed penis. Though that second link was indeed a portal to exactly that.) Armor that doesn’t protect you isn’t armor. A Timberland jacket covers the flesh better than the erector set Damon has stapled to his body. Have headshots not been invented in this dystopian future? I haven’t seen anything this ridiculously unintimidating since I put popsicle sticks between my fingers as a kid and pretended I was Wolverine.

I’m not sure how three paragraphs of shitting on Elysium is going to convince anyone to see it, but I promise I have positive feelings about the film. As any of my exes will attest to, heaping abuse upon something is how I show affection. Someone watch Elysium and leave a comment as to how the stupid suit works, though. That part really does baffle me. (I’m crossing my fingers that one of its powers permits Matt Damon to turbo-top Michael Douglas.)

Tagged as: Movie Review.