Elysium

By M

This movie is a shame. It gives you the exact same feeling you have when marking essays and the only thing you can say is ‘everything is in there, it’s just poorly presented’. So poorly presented that there is no fair way you can actually pass the student. It’s a terrible feeling.

In fact, there is only one idea ‘in there’ and that is the creation of a cyborg (Matt Damon). All the rest is a series of conspicuous display of Hollywood resources, poor acting (by good actors, but, hell yes, language matters), and cliches. A bulk of those, all over the place: poor people speak Spanish (despite the two main poor people being Brazilian actors), women can only be powerful if they cut their hair short, Russians are mean psychopaths, you name it.

I tried to save the movie while watching it by thinking ‘well, I might be able to argue that this is a metaphor for the Lampedusa tragedy’, I can’t. It’s hard because I defended Blomkamp at the time of District 9, while acknowledging the metaphors were a tiny bit too obvious.

To be completely fair, it must be said that there are several mysteries that make this movie intriguing:

1. Why does Diego Luna wear plaits?

Before 1  – Why does he even play in this movie?

2. Why do you hire Jodie Foster and Matt Damon if you don’t intend to shoot a single scene with them together? Are they not in speaking terms? Why?

3. Why is Matt Damon the only native English speaker in L.A.? What happened to Hollywood? Why L.A.?

4. Why does Matt Damon not bleed when screws are screwed four centimeters into his brain? Why does everyone smoke in a surgery? Why is nobody concerned with infections? Are they already cyborgs? Why don’t they tell us that story?

5. Why was Anthony Lane’s critique in the New Yorker so measured when we are talking about the worst movie of this era?

All these mysteries deserve reflection, but not that you inflict yourself the pain of watching this movie.