Tag Archives: review

Review: Elysium

Posted on by
3

I enjoyed District 9 back in the day, so when I heard the director was putting out another sci-fi movie, titled Elysium, I was immediately interested. Of course, my life was a mess at the time, so it’s taken me until now to actually watch it.

Matt Damon as Max Da Costa in ElysiumSet 150 years in the future, Elysium depicts a dystopic planet Earth utterly ruined by disease, overpopulation, and pollution. The wealthy have escaped to a vast, paradisaical space station, Elyisum, where their every need is fulfilled, and any sickness can be instantly cured.

The story follows Max Da Costa, played by Matt Damon, an ex-con factory worker. He receives a lethal dose of radiation in an industrial accident and is given five days to live. Meanwhile, his childhood friend, Frey, struggles to support her daughter, who is dying from leukemia.

I think you can see where this is going.

I was expecting Elysium to be an intellectual, thought-provoking piece of science fiction. As it turns out, not so much. The story is fairly straightforward, and the messaging is quite ham-fisted.

In particular, the ruling class of Elysium are so cartoonishly heartless and evil it’s difficult to take seriously sometimes. Even my anti-corporate, pro-equality, angry leftist self found this to be a case of laying it on a bit thick. It’s certainly not the chillingly believable dystopia of Continuum.

Thankfully, though, Elysium does have other strengths to call upon.

The titular space station in ElysiumElysium didn’t turn out to be a think-piece so much as a fairly standard sci-fi action adventure, but in that, it does its job well. The action sequences are brutal, visceral, and exciting. The special effects are spectacular, and the art design is strong. It manages to both an incredibly ugly movie and an absolute feast for the eyes at the same time.

The main characters are a little thin, but they’re good enough to keep you engaged. Similarly, the acting is adequate but not award-worthy. I was able to forget I was watching Matt Damon after a while, at least.

Actually, the best acting probably comes from the main antagonist, played by Sharlto Copley, who is so skin-crawlingly vile from beginning to end that I spent half the movie visualizing gruesome and painful fates for him.

Elysium has a pretty strong emotional punch, and while the journey to get there is a little inconsistent, its ending is one of the more powerful and satisfying that I’ve seen in recent memory.

So in the end Elysium is a lot like District 9. It, too, was a bit rough around the edges, but ultimately it was a good movie, and the same is true of Elysium. Not a masterpiece, but worth your time.

Overall rating: 7.3/10

Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Posted on by
Reply

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is another movie I missed out while I was living out in the middle of nowhere, but thanks to Netflix, I have now caught up.

Caesar leads his people in Dawn of the Planet of the ApesThe previous movie was somewhat imperfect, but still enjoyable on the whole, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is pretty much the same. It’s more well put together than Rise was, but still ultimately unsatisfying in some ways.

For Dawn, the plot jumps ahead ten years and goes full post-apocalyptic. Most of the human race has been wiped out by the so-called “simian flu,” to the point where the apes believe humans are extinct altogether.

The apes, on the other hand, have prospered, and led by Caesar, they have begun to build their own society in the wilderness of California.

Caesar and the orangutan Maurice are the only characters to return from the first movie, though I doubt anyone’s complaining, as the human cast members were by far the weakest link of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Things change when a group of human scouts stumbles into ape territory, hoping to reactivate an old hydro-electric dam to power an enclave of survivors. Relations between apes and humans are initially tense, but Caesar hopes to come to an understanding with the humans, and he finds a kindred spirit in a human named Malcolm and his family.

Malcolm confronts the apes in Dawn of the Planet of the ApesBut there are elements on both sides who are distrustful. The biggest obstacle to coexistent between human and ape comes from Koba, a lieutenant of Caesar’s who was tortured by human medical experiments in the past and wants nothing more than to make humanity suffer.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes wisely puts a greater emphasis on the apes than its predecessor, and they remain the more interesting and developed half of the plot, but this time the humans are not so flat and lifeless, and they also prove a worthy contribution to the story.

There are also a lot less things in this movie that are, well, stupid, compared to Rise. There are still some implausible or ridiculous things — Caesar seems to have Wolverine-levels of healing ability, and the size of the ape population seems to vary based on the needs of the plot at any given moment — but on the whole it’s a much more well-written story.

However, the themes and arc of the story are a bit confused. It often seems to be wanting to tell a morally gray story, with neither the apes nor the humans being entirely good or evil, but in practice it does tend to make the apes out to be bad guys more often than not. Ultimately Caesar and Maurice are the only decent apes.

It makes the movie a bit hard to get invested in, because the apes are the focus and the main characters, but they’re also the villains. It’s… odd.

Perhaps because of this, I found the story somewhat unsatisfying. The ending is neither pleasant nor conclusive.

Overall rating: 7.3/10 Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting but flawed movie.