Elysium--Movie Review

Photo: Movie's poster, from its Wikipedia page.

Elysium is a very satisfying action / sci-fi movie with a surprisingly blatant social commentary about immigration and health care.  Because immigration is such a fireplug, your stance on it may very well decide how you enjoy the movie.  As a guy who's usually sick with sinus infections, and who has a mostly-liberal bent, this stance was okay with me, but if you're a solid conservative, or severely anti-immigration, consider yourself forewarned.

It stars Matt Damon, who can do this sort of action movie in his sleep these days, and Jodie Foster, in a role that's rather thankless and one-note.  Foster, in fact, is sort of wasted in this role, and she gives herself an occasional accent that befuddles as well.  Writer / director Neill Blomkamp didn't seem to know what to do with her character after the film's bad guys enter Elysium (the utopian society in space populated only by the rich), though while watching the movie, I thought her character could have still gone places: though a psyche reversal was clearly not going to happen, she could have been more of a problem for Matt Damon's character.  Maybe Blomkamp felt the bad guy was more than bad enough, and I suppose he is.  After all, he gets a large chunk of his face blown off, and stays conscious the whole time until he's re-configured by one of Elysium's health pods.  And as you may imagine, if he was a really angry bad guy before his face was blown off, he becomes even more severely pissed off afterwards.  In truth, his character is a comic book villain, and I have already taken the character more seriously than the viewer is supposed to.  Suffice it to say, he, more than Jodie Foster's character, is Damon's character's obstacle.

Speaking of Damon, he does a good job here, even though he plays an ex-con, a side of his character that is not heavily covered, which is perhaps a good thing, since Damon doesn't come across as an ex-con kind of guy, whatever that is.  He's too earnest, too sacrificial.  In fact, all of the ex-cons (and current cons) on Earth come across much more altruistically than I'm going to guess ex-cons really would.  There's not a sincerely bad guy in that bunch; they're all victims of dystopian class-consciousness.  Originally his character was going to do some shady things in order to get himself to Elysium's health pods, to cure him of a massive radiation blast he accidentally incurred at work.  He's got just five days to live otherwise, and a truly depressing, soul-sucking, worker-ant life to go to even if he is cured, so he really has nothing left to lose.  But when we're introduced to a little girl who needs to get to Elysium's health pods to cure her of Stage Three leukemia, you know that Damon's character will willfully get the short end of the stick.  It is one of the slight letdowns: the viewer never has a doubt that he will overcome all odds and save the little girl.

Despite the transparency of the plot, the movie still worked for me because of Damon's earnestness, because of the incredible special effects (which are shown only with necessary, and never overdone to the point of CGI overload), and because of the great action pacing.  And the score, too, I guess, though that, more than the special effects, gets overused at times.  I also could have done without the blatant moralizing, though I do agree wholeheartedly with its point.  It's just that the message is as in-your-face as the action sequences, and so they made odd bedfellows to me.  If that message doesn't bother you, the movie is worth seeing if you like action / sci-fi / special effects movies.  If the message does bother you, I still recommend the movie if (and only if) you really like action / sci-fi / special effects movies.  There's enough to like here without the message getting in the way, if you don't agree with it.

And what is that message, exactly?  That every immigrant who wants to come to the U.S. for health care should make it?  (In the movie, Earth is very clearly Mexico, or other very poor countries, and Elysium is very clearly the U.S.)  That health care should be universal?  That the U.S. / Mexican border wall should come down?  I don't know, and I don't think the movie really knows, either.  But it's some combination of all of those things.  The movie won't sway you, either way, and it certainly won't change your mind, no matter what side of the fence you're on.

Argo

Photo: Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, from the film, and from the film's Wikipedia page.

I'd wanted to see this film for a long time, since before it came out, and I'm glad I did.  I'm not a huge Ben Affleck fan; I've long considered him to be the more pale of the Affleck / Damon team.  But he directs Argo even better than he acts in it, and he wisely keeps his acting subdued and minimal throughout.  (In fact, one wonders if that was all his real-life character said to the people he helped save.)

It's filmed in a purposely grainy 70s style, more old 70s film than documentary film, if you know what I mean.  The sets, style, props and costume are all pitch-perfect.  The film even opens as if it were a 70s Warner Bros. showing (which I'm just old enough to remember), a nice touch that I noticed right away.  Anyway, this film is all 70s, all the time, even superficially so--and this helped it a great deal.

The directing, pace and acting was so good that, although you know how it's going to turn out (everyone of that age knows that all the Iran hostages came out alive, right?), it's still full of tension anyway.  For this reason, the Academy's snub of Affleck as director is a little confusing, although the other directors also did great jobs, and their films were maybe a little harder to direct.  Maybe.  I don't have a beef with any of those nominations, but it would've been nice to have a sixth slot for Affleck.

In terms of the film being an actor's showcase (which it essentially is, just like Lincoln, which was a better film, and hence the snub, maybe), it's really Alan Arkin's film.  Arkin is all over the place recently, which is nice to see, as he's been a great, but sporadic, actor for a long time.  (One of his better recently was in the silly but very watchable Get Smart.)  He has all the good lines here, and he delivers them with clear amusement.  (This is very obvious when he delivers the movie's catch-phrase, which involves the movie title, and which he delivers with relish.)  He and John Goodman obviously had a good time filming this.  Though those two characters have limited roles, and though they're literally trapped in their office on-set (they have to be there when the phone rings), they manage to somehow carry the film from that side of the Pond.  In a small but clear way, this is a Hollywood film that pokes fun at itself.

At just two hours, it's also one of the shorter better films of the year.  It doesn't feel too short, and it definitely would've seemed too long had it been so.  The film doesn't have anything more to say but which it says.  Speaking of that, don't leave the theatre at the end of the film if you'd like to see photos of the real-life people juxtaposed with the actors who played them, as well as some historically-relevant shots of the real people with other important real people of the time.

I normally don't recommend spending $11.50 on a film that's just two hours long, that doesn't need to be seen on the big screen to fully appreciate.  (I want to see so many films that I have to narrow it down.  Two of the ways I do this is to choose longer films--thereby getting more bang for the same eleven and a half bucks--and to choose films, usually action or sci-fi, that need to be seen on the big screen.  Prometheus was one of those.)  But I do recommend spending that money to see this short-ish film that doesn't need the big screen to fully appreciate.  Just see the longer ones that need the big screen first, as I did.