Elysium

For plot reasons too convoluted to explain here, Elysium found it necessary to surgically implant a really old Garmin into the back of Matt Damon's head.

I just watched Elysium.  It was vivid, original, and flawed.  It made me uncomfortable, but I was riveted.  Quite a few reviewers disliked it.  I think I know why.

So yes, there were all kinds of things to dislike about how Elysium was put together.  The plot was a hot mess, full of holes and missing backstories.  The relationships between the characters seemed to take place at a distance.  A love story between Matt Damon and Alice Braga is gestured at but never fleshed out.  One character is killed and resurrected in a cheap, cheap, cheap plot twist.  Many actions are superficially motivated by concern for a sick child, but the movie treats her as nothing more than an adorable human football, to be whisked from one place to another for dramatic purposes.  We barely have the opportunity to know her.

Also, Jodie Foster's accent is all over the place, but you know, the movie is set in like 2152 or something.  Maybe in the 22nd century there's a whole country full of people whose accents are a shifting, vaguely patrician mashup of British-y, generic European-y, possibly South African-y actor-babble.  I mean, it's the future.  They have magic beds that cure your diseases and robot servants and a space station that looks like West Egg rolled onto the inside of a bicycle tire.  One lady with forced, stilted speech patterns is probably the least odd part of this movie's world.

None of that bothered me.  Not really.  The thing that I found so riveting and uncomfortable was the way social inequality was always front and center.  In case you missed the previews, in this version of the future the poor live on the overpopulated, polluted earth, dying of preventable diseases, oppressed by robotic police, and covered in dreadful tattoos, while the rich live on a spinning, mansion-encrusted wealth-donut that is literally in the heavens (or, if you prefer the ancient Greek, in Elysium.)

Movies that hit shopping mall theaters in small-town America rarely have anything to say about global economic inequality, let alone portray it as viscerally as this movie does.  The allegory of Elysium is less coherent than that of director Neill Blomkamp's previous film District 9, but in some ways this adds to the new film's emotional impact.  We see nearly two hours of the apathy of the privileged toward the plight of the dispossessed, and then (without going into too many spoilers) the eventual solution the movie finds to these problems feels inadequate and unconvincing.  I didn't walk out of the theater with the exhilaration of a thrilling ride neatly wrapped up.  Instead, I left with an unease brought on by a story that showed a messy and real problem, then failed to demonstrate a satisfying solution.  In large part, I think, it was this unease that made so many people dislike Elysium.

The only parts of the movie that I disliked without reservation were several stupid, robotically augmented super-mega-fistfights scored to relentless thump-thump-thumpy music.  I guess there must be quite a bit of overlap now between movie effects designers and video game designers, because those fights were about as interesting as watching several total strangers play Halo.

So should you go see Elysium?  Eh, maybe.  The production design is really interesting.  Matt Damon has been working out a lot and spends a little bit of time with his shirt off, if you like that sort of thing.  Ah, I don't know.  It's interesting that this movie exists, but the in-the-moment experience of it is exhausting.  Perhaps you would be better off saving the money you'd spend on tickets and popcorn and instead donating it to Doctors Without Borders.