Why Elysium Disappointed Me

Elysium is not bad, which in and of itself is not the most ringing endorsement. It's definitely heavy handed, and I sort of wonder why, when so much of the cast is part of an insular Latino community, Matt Damon is the main character, but whatever, if you want to see a dude go from living person to strawberry jam in 2 seconds this film is for you.

The bigger problem, to me anyway, is that Battle Angel (and not Burst Angel, as I mistakenly said to a friend earlier) covered a lot of the same ground 23 years ago and did a better job of it. Battle Angel (at least the OVAs, which are what I watched) followed the Steven Spielberg school of thought by never showing their floating city, instead focusing on the actual emotional impact of living in garbage but knowing that paradise was just a few short miles above you.

Another problem is that Elysium pulls its punches. While Battle Angel explicitly shows how little the people in Zalem care about the inhabitants of the city below (by buying the organs of people without questioning the source and straight up murdering those who try to ascend), Elysium is too tied to emulating the border situation between the U.S. and Mexico today: while you see two ships get shot out of the sky (two ships filled with no one we care about by the way), when the third ship makes it to Elysium the people inside are deported instead of being gunned down. You know that Earth is in bad shape in Elysium because everything is dirty and people are lighting fires at night, but you never actually see any wanton crime or violence. In Battle Angel, you see several murders in the streets: you get a sense that things really are bad there.

But okay, you've already shown the WASP paradise that is Elysium (the space station, not the movie), and you don't want to disturb audience members by showing a realistic run-down dystopian future. My next problem comes in how easy it is to A. Get to Elysium (which apparently is so devoid of weapons that it's only orbital defense is a dude with a missile launcher firing FROM EARTH) B. Have a shoot-out on Elysium without any intervention. If it's as easy to get to Elysium as the movie shows it is, why on Earth has it not already been overrun? How does a guy throw a grenade into the Elysium equivalent of a command and control center without a robot death squad murdering his face? Again, other movies have done it better: in The Curse of the Golden Flower we see Prince Jai's army apparently take the Forbidden City only to be brutally massacred in a massive ambush and have their corpses and all sign of carnage cleared away in a matter of minutes. This scene clearly shows the power and control of the emperor, and a similar scene (even if it allowed a small victory to the protagonist to keep it from being so bleak) might have done a better job of displaying the power of Elysium.

Instead we see a film whose legacy is to be heavy-handed and kind of fun at parts, but ultimately forgettable.

On another note, I went to Shake N' Burger after the movie and it was pretty good. I got their juicy burger, which lived up to the name. I topped it off with a good chocolate malt, and unlike some people I went with I didn't spill it all over the floor of Suburbatron.