Sub-Orbital

Over the weekend, between painting sessions at the house, I went to see the new film Elysium -- about an action hero fighting to get to a paradise orbital platform above a used-up future Earth. This is writer-director Neill Blomkamp's first effort since District 9. That film was a beneficiary a few years back when the Oscars expanded their Best Picture category from 5 nominees to 10, though I personally wasn't impressed enough by it to understand or agree with the nomination.

Elysium is not as good. This is a case where using Flickchart to rate the movie wound up surprising me. When I walked out of the theater, I wasn't exactly disappoint with the movie. I knew it wasn't a new favorite or anything like that. I even knew "I think I liked District 9 better." But when I got home and plugged it into Flickchart, I was shocked at how low it fell. It wasn't that bad, was it? And yet, looking at the movies right around it, above and below, I felt like it had landed right where it deserved.

To be fair, the movie is not that bad. But it's not that great either. And it took me trying to understand the low Flickchart placement to contemplate why. I'd say it mainly comes down to the shallow characters. Everyone in the film is a one-dimensional caricature that seems unmotivated by anything realistic other than the need to progress the plot. Matt Damon's heroic protagonist is the one possible exception to that, but even if his motivations are slightly more complex, they're very stereotypical for an action movie. The characters only become more cliched the farther down you go. Jodie Foster's conspiring bureaucrat is a mustache-twirling villain with a half-assed "think of protecting the children" justification that falls completely flat. The more physical bad guy, played by District 9's Sharlto Copley, is even more cardboard, a menace who enjoys killing so much that he continues to do so even when he's no longer officially employed to do so.

As with District 9, the most compelling part of the story is the social allegory. Elysium is a metaphor for income inequality and a lack of social mobility. But compared the the far more clever District 9, the metaphor here is delivered in a very ham-fisted way. Resources and technology on the titular Elysium station seem to be inexhaustible (a fact that seems to be literally confirmed late in the film), making the hording of those things a nonsensical plot device. And that's only one of several "but then why?" moments the film forces you to ask, yet never satisfactorily answers.

As I said, the movie isn't that bad. The action is sharper than that of most movies so far this year (assuming you don't mind some rather graphic violence), and the movie does at least try for something more sophisticated than "let's destroy an entire city!" But it just doesn't come together that well. I give Elysium a C+. Walking out of the theater, I probably would have said "B- or maybe even B," but in the crucible of all the movies I've seen, too many are better than this. So C+ it is.