Thoughts on: Elysium


I am so sick of shaky cameras. After being blown away by District 9, it was shocking to see Neill Blomkamp stoop to such lazy filming. None of the fight scenes were fresh or engaging, and the camera only stood still long enough each fight to show off some new gadget before going back to indiscriminate blurs of punches or guns firing. Everything was just so derivative and ordinary. Occasionally you’d see a cool camera angle, a clever use of silence or a particularly nice special effect, just to let you know there was at least some creative spark left. However these were few and far between and were nowhere near enough to salvage the movie.

Blomkamp showed us in District 9 that he likes to commentate on society, and he did an excellent job of handling discrimination in that movie. In this movie, however, whatever commentary he might have originally had clearly got lost in the process. While the first quarter of the movie has some nice scenes of Matt Damon living in slums and dealing with robot police and the failing system, any social commentary found later is extremely superficial. And while a tonne of effort was put into making the world of District 9 seemed alive and real, Elysium is overflowing with inconsistencies. The ending exemplifies this – suddenly there’s a fleet of medical ships with rows and rows of healing bays, and yet they've never been used to heal the population? Then why did they even exist? Are we supposed to believe that the upper class built them and then didn't use them just to be evil? Things like that made it impossible to take the future presented in Elysium seriously.

Pacing was another huge problem in this movie – for the final 40 minutes, everything was just escalating and zooming along at breakneck speed. It’s no mystery why: if they’d slowed down, it would've just given the audience a chance to realise how absurd the situation was and how many plot holes were piling up. Instead, we’re left exhausted trying to keep up with the nauseating camera movements. And because we’re exhausted, we just stopped caring. Any chance at a fulfilling story or an emotional impact was lost.

While I might be too harsh on Elysium by comparing it to something as masterful as District 9, I also know that without the same director, I would have seen its true colours – “Just Another Action Movie” – and skipped it completely.

5/10


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some D&D 5th Edition House-rules

General A larger number of sources of advantage or disadvantage  beats a lesser number of sources of the opposite kind. That is, each source of either advantage or disadvantage can negate one source of the other, instead of all sources. For example, gaining advantage from 2 sources can not only negate 1 source of disadvantage, but you then still gain advantage on top of that. Not only does this raise the skill ceiling of combat, but it addresses the problem of more than one source of advantage being useless, despite it being easy to get from multiple sources. The ease with which players can gain advantage from class features etc also discourages them from trying to find it by fictionally positioning their characters in an advantageous position. Note that this doesn't mean you can get "double advantage" or anything like that! You either have advantage, disadvantage, or neither. Combat If you reach 0 HP  and are downed, you gain a level of exhaustion. This prevent
Read more

Variant Rule for D&D 5e: Inspiration

The 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is, for many people, the best edition of D&D to date. Similar to previous editions, the various systems that make up the rules are separate enough that creating house rules is fairly painless, with the possibility for unforeseen ramifications kept to a minimum. The Dungeon Master's Guide is, in many ways, an enormous collection of house rules, ready to be used or ignored to meet the needs of each play group. These house rules go by the name of "Variant Rules" in the DMG. While a great system, 5e is not without its shortcomings. One common complaint is that despite Inspiration being a good mechanic, the rules for actually gaining Inspiration are far too vague for players to feel that they can reliably recoup it once they spend it. This leads to players simply sitting on their Inspiration until they're at risk of death, and the rules for gaining Inspiration slowly fade into the background, forgotten. And lets be honest
Read more

Adventures in Sweden

Image
Source: Google As my plane descended into Swedish territory, I couldn't have asked for better timing. Dawn had barely arrived, fog surrounding the thousands of islands littering the "coastline". It was difficult to tell where the sea stopped and rivers began, but one thing was for certain – the Swedes don’t lack trees. Dense forest stretched as far as I could see – which is quite a substantial distance when you're several kilometers off the ground. As the plane headed inland, quaint green fields started to break up the mass of trees. Classic bright red barns with pointed roofs suddenly called into question my assumption that they only existed in fairy tales. Clearly, my plane had been diverted to Narnia sometime in the night. Source: Google Source: Google As a bullet train (boasting 100% renewable energy, like there was any doubt) shot me from the airport towards Stockholm, Narnia slowly gave way to a modern cityscape. But not entirely modern – my p
Read more