Elysium

[Steve Williams]

IMO 2013 has been anything but a good year for movies. For me there have only been 2-3 films that I have seen this year that were remotely good. Having seen the trailers for Elysium for several months I felt this would be one of those good films. Alas, such was not the case. My wife even commented that the film was so bad it should never have been made. Nonetheless it was our feeling when we went that this should be a terrific film.

In the year 2154 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes, a government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn't stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

How could it be bad with Jodie Foster and Matt Damon in the starring roles. It was worse than bad. Nothing in the film worked for me although the cgi were very good.

The story line was so far fetched that we were watching street gangs of people on earth that were implanting things in Damon's brain and spine to give him strength as well as filling his brain with all the names of the citizens of earth. Well having said that, then you know what the story is all about.I can't believe that Foster and Damon loaned their star status to this abomination of a film

2 out of 4 stars (I'm being generous )

Wait until it's available to rent but even if you do, do so at your own risk

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Wow. That's disappointing. I was expecting this to be the Sci-Fi film of the summer. One with brains as well as FX. I trust your reviews, Steve (because I usually agree with them ). This one will wait for video.

Tim

 

[FrantzM]

Saw it , liked it ... Not a great movie ... Nothing transcendental... Entertaining until you start thinking about the plot. It is however an interesting commentary of society, of the widening gap between rich and poor or the state of health care in some countries (hint! hint!) Of how we tend to allow some of our fellow humans to live in abject poverty while we shelter our existences in extravagances or trivialities... Of how we can refuse a person a way to come out of his wrongdoings ... There was lot of that in it .. As for the technology ... I am seeing right now the kind of high tech hacking that goes in really backwaters places .. some poor countries like my own Haiti do breed incredible talent with a knack to hack the highest tech as I see some people routinely repairing cell phones at the component level .. Not far fetch to me in that sense ... The device that re-atomize people and bring them their face or health (whatever the condition) in 15 secs, is a little extreme then again you would have told a person in 1813 that their entire book library would fit in a device the size of a thumb or All the books in their publiclibrary would fit in the same device .. They would have taken you to the Guillotine ...

 

[Steve Williams]

Not a great movie ... Nothing transcendental... Entertaining until you start thinking about the plot

precisely my point

The movie was pure crap.

 

[Keith_W]

The premise of the film is certainly interesting. Blomkamp's previous film (District 9) combined sci-fi with social commentary, and I was hoping for the same here. Back then it was about apartheid and the inhumanity of the humans, which made you develop sympathy for the aliens - quite an achievement considering how ugly they were in that movie. This time it is about the divide between the haves and the have nots, and whether medicine should be denied to those who can not afford to pay for it. Interesting themes ... if they are explored properly. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I will reserve judgement.

 

[Steve Williams]

The premise of the film is certainly interesting. Blomkamp's previous film (District 9) combined sci-fi with social commentary, and I was hoping for the same here. Back then it was about apartheid and the inhumanity of the humans, which made you develop sympathy for the aliens - quite an achievement considering how ugly they were in that movie. This time it is about the divide between the haves and the have nots, and whether medicine should be denied to those who can not afford to pay for it. Interesting themes ... if they are explored properly. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I will reserve judgement.

well Keith as an oncologist you will be most interested how this little girl with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia is cured in 15 seconds by a reatomizer. However as Frantz suggests, don't laugh as anything is possible. This film is far from the brilliance of District 9

 

[Steve Williams]

Not 'Elysium,' But Better 'Ringworld' Settlements Could Return Our Future to Its Past (Commentary)

By Dave Brody, Science and Technology Writer | SPACE.com


In Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey," the ancestor of humanity throws a bone into the air, which cinematically becomes a spacecraft (an orbiting weapon) sharing the sky with a rotating space station. That's the bone I have to pick with "Elysium" writer-director Neill Blomkamp.
There's not much about "Elysium" I don't love. It's an important, fun, gutsy film (see my "Elysium" movie review on SPACE.com). But to this longtime space enthusiast (read: "geek"), Blomkamp’s appropriation of a ring-world as an icon of evil feels, well, inappropriate. Turning a spin-stabilized, gravity-simulating space settlement into a supercilious, off-Earth Beverly Hills is a gross perversion of a great idea.

But maybe that's exactly Blomkamp's point.
"I tend to think a lot about the topic of wealth discrepancy," Blomkamp said in a statement. "I think the further we go down the path that we are on, the more the world will represent the one in 'Elysium'... In Mexico City, in Johannesburg, in Rio, you have pockets of great wealth, gated communities, amidst a sea of poverty. And I think that's where the cities of the US are going to end up, too."

Early in the film, Blomkamp establishes his giant space habitat named Elysium, as a heavenly home to a half-million ultra-wealthy citizens. He and his visual effects and production designers settled on architecture 37.2 miles (60 kilometers) in diameter and 1.86 miles (3 km) wide. Active air pressure sprays contain its recycling atmosphere. There is no "roof," so space shuttles can come and go (essential to the movie’s plot). A large mass of water ballast stabilizes the wheel-world’s spin, which in turn imparts simulated gravity. "Down" is outward from the center of rotation.

Longtime space enthusiasts will recognize this as derivative of the seminal space colony design project held during the summer of 1975 at Stanford University, thereafter enshrined in our lore as a "Stanford Torus."
But that was not a wholly new idea. In the late 1920’s, Herman Potocnika and Wernher von Braun proposed donut-shaped space stations rotating to give their residents the effects of gravity by centripetal acceleration.

In 1952, von Braun and other space visionaries – including astronomer Fred Whipple, space science writer Willey Ley and illustrators Chesley Bonestell, Rolf Klep and Fred Freeman – were called to a symposium staged by Colliers magazine. Their creative imagineering spawned a series of articles, titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" which ran in this widely read periodical from 1952 to 1954. Ley penned a highly detailed description of life and work aboard such stations and Freeman created intricate cutaway views.

Hollywood got hold of the idea a year later, as producer George Pal made "Conquest of Space" into a dramatic film, in which astronaut characters depart from low-Earth orbit to explore Mars. The movie contains one of cinema's most obvious continuity errors: The wheel-like space station is seen to change its direction of rotation across a series of camera cuts.
By 1962, the spinning space donut idea had made it to TV. "Planet Patrol’s" Galasphere 347 was a seemingly inflatable sky-wheel with an intrepid crew of marionettes. Exploiting a breakthrough in visual effects, their mouths moved in sync with their voice actors’ soundtrack!
In 1968, "2001: A Space Odyssey" expanded the orbital torus concept to a larger-capacity paired ring. The film depicts this station as operational while under construction, just as the actual International Space Station would be in the actual year 2001.
ISS, being a government-run project, is of course much smaller and is not ring-shaped. Further, it fails to offer variable gravity to its tiny crew and has been more costly to build than 20 Hollywood big-budget-blockbuster movies.

A mere two years after Clarke and Kubrick's novel and film came out, hard science fiction author Larry Niven blew the airlock-doors off size expectations with his "Ringworld." Niven imagined what would happen if an advanced civilization turned the material resources of its entire inner solar system into a ring with roughly the diameter of Earth's orbit. That yields a torus with a circumference of nearly 600 million miles (966 million km). Niven calculated there'd be enough material to make such a ring about 1 million miles (1.6 million km) wide.
Which brings us rotating around back to the Stanford Torus: For those of us space enthusiasts old enough to have lived it the first time around, Blomkamp's Elysium is bittersweet. (Full disclosure: This reporter worked with Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill’s Space Studies Institute to develop and promote self-sustaining space settlements and the technologies to build them.)
It is very nice to see the full-up Stanford Torus-derived habitat in "Elysium" rendered with all the craft, skill and computer graphic muscle that a Hollywood budget confers. But it’s a bit of a stomach punch too.
Far from exclusive playgrounds for the mega-wealthy, such space colonies were originally conceived as egalitarian engines for wealth distribution. We imagined self-sustaining islands built, as much as possible, with materials and energy NOT raped from Earth, but from the unused bounty of the moon, asteroids and the all-powerful sun.
At the start, they were simply an answer to a question of physics that Dr. O’Neill posed to the brightest students in his undergrad physics class during a special weekly seminar he’d set up for them: "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?"

 

[jazdoc]

Matt Damon and Jodie Foster apparently don't see the irony that as pampered highly paid movie stars, they live an existence isolated from the little people who go to their movies.

 

[Steve Williams]

I have always liked Jodie Foster as an actor and director and have always felt her to be a beautiful woman but man did she stink up the screen with this performance.

 

[rockitman]

I thought that the clear socialist agenda of this movie would be a hit with the masses. I guess not.

 

[Steve Williams]

I thought that the clear socialist agenda of this movie would be a hit with the masses. I guess not.

it garnered a "60"on MRQE.com

http://www.mrqe.com/movie_reviews/elysium-m100103942

 

[JackD201]

Seeing Matt Damon as a cyborg turned me off the second I saw the trailer. If his "bionics" were at least implanted I wouldn't have had such a WTF reaction.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

While I compltely understand credibility gaps with the technical details (though it is Science Fiction, ater all), I'm a bit surprised with some of the reaction to themes. Honestly, if we completely trashed earth, and were capable of constructing a small, ideal cyber planet at great expense, does anyone imagine it would end up populated by anyone but the rich and powerful? And if they do, have they read any of the world's history, do they understand human nature at all?

Tim

 

[jazdoc]

If you want to see something similar but a true classic of dystopia watch "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang.

http://metropolis1927.com/

 

[Keith_W]

I just watched it tonight. I agree Steve - it's a pretty bad movie. The jiggling camera made me nauseated, and I could not understand what that South African bad guy was yelling half the time. Neither could I understand the curly haired guy in the singlet who was supposedly going to save the world.

 

[jfrech]

I have always liked Jodie Foster as an actor and director and have always felt her to be a beautiful woman but man did she stink up the screen with this performance.

I have to agree with you here. The role didn't really suit her or she couldn't pull it off....I have always loved her other movies...

 

[Elberoth]

I just watched it tonight. I agree Steve - it's a pretty bad movie.

+1. Huge dispointment.