Director: Neil Blomkamp
Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster
Runtime: 105 Minutes
There are movies based on Games and then there are Movies that aspire to be Games. And then there is Elysium, confusing them all. It’s nothing short of a boring game-look-alike-film lacking the kind of emotional connect that the plot wishes to portray through the class-divide, over-population, and future inevitable problems that the world is going to face, while just trying to satiate the sci-fi taste buds in roughly a little more than 100 minutes.
It’s the story of two Worlds, of the rich and of the poor, who can’t buy out their way towards the protected Elysium where the habit has been protected from the disease filled atmosphere of the “Earth”.
Neil Blomkamp, the director of movies like District9 fails to live upto his track record, in building this concept to an actual movie and not just a prelude to a game.
Matt Damon couldn’t just pull it off, except the sci-fi action scenes, he looked out of place in most of the duration of the film, be it the emotionally-induced scenes with Frey, his childhood friend (Played by Alice Braga) or scenes where he has to be the One-force that can change the course of the film. He just doesn’t look the protagonist who will take the plunge to do it all.
With some little drama put in, Elysium may even seem looking like borrowing some ideas from Bollywood!! But if you see it from that angle as well, it still fails to add the glitz required to make it an pot-boiling entertainer as well.
Jodie Foster playing Jessica Delacourt looks stylishly cunning in a powerful role of Defence secretary, and yet falters on with the role treatment in the later part of the movie, same as the movie which promises to build up initially only to be marred down by the plot, which basically runs on a very thin ice.
It’s highly avoidable, and even though the sci-fi sequences and the Elysium planet set looks just superb, it is just a waste of your time and money.
I’m going with 1.5 out of 5 for Neil Blomkamps’ Elysium.