Elysium Looks Good, Falls Flat

Not since Avatar has there been a science-fiction movie been so invested in delivering a message while having so little faith in the capacity of its audience to grasp it.

Writer/Director Neil Blomkamp takes great pains to have you understand that Elysium, unlike other summer fare, is Very Serious Business. His last film, District 9, was a thinly veiled allegory about racism and oppression. This movie takes whatever thin veil there was and rips it to shreds.

 

There’s no question that Elysium means well. It tries hard to wrap messages about immigration, health care, and class warfare into an action-packed, robot-filled package that summer moviegoers will enjoy. The problem with that is that with much of its two-hour running time taken up with (admittedly very well-filmed) fight scenes, Elysium doesn’t really have any sort of time to expand on its premise. The result is cartoonish, straw-man villains, under-explored settings, and an ending that fails to make sense. We’re supposed to imagine that the world would be a perfect place if only the rich snobs who run the titular space station of Elysium would let the poor, working masses in so that they could receive treatment from the magical health care robots up there (machines that can flawlessly restore a man’s face after it was blown off by a grenade, but are unable to resuscitate a woman who died of blood-loss five minutes earlier.)

 

The movie seems to suggest, however, that all the inequality in its world, all the injustice, and all the woes that beset humanity can be solved by the simple press of a button (literally). And that just doesn’t feel anything close to realistic; it undermines both the movie’s premise and its attempts at political relevancy.

 

It might be possible to just ignore logic and enjoy some good sci-fi action if Bomkamp weren’t trying so darned hard to hit you with his message. It’s hard to say what the most cringe-worthy scene in Elysium is. Maybe it’s the part where a Hispanic girl is taken to a healing robot only for it to deny her treatment because she is not a citizen (it’s an analogy about health care reform for immigrant children. Get it?) Maybe it’s villainess Jodie Foster’s speech about the people of earth (“do you want them coming into your homes, stealing the world you built for your children and your children’s children?” she demands of the leaders of Elysium.) Quite possibly it’s the fact that we’re supposed to accept Matt Damon as a latino. I suppose Nomkamp felt we wouldn’t have grasped Elysium’s subtle parallels to illegal immigration unless all the protagonists spoke Spanish, but didn’t want to cast an actual latino as a main character and risk losing ticket sales?

 

Despite its heavy-handed, plodding seriousness, Elysium manages to entertain, in large part due to the quality of its action scenes and to its gritty look. Just as in District 9, robots and laser-guns are mixed with slums and so much dust and grit you’ll need a long shower once you leave the theater. Elysium looks good, and it has the aesthetic of a good gangster film. Someone in the art department was doing their job; the world of Elysium, flat as it is, looks and sounds like a real place.

 

The action-scenes are actually better than District 9′s. There’s just the right amount of shaky-cam to liven things up, but not too much to give you a headache (as there was in another Matt Damon-starring action series). My only question was why, in a world filled with laser guns that can burn through walls and explosives that can track peoples heat signatures everyone seems so eager to engage Matt Damon in a fist-fight.

 

Damon serves as a likable hero and his nemesis, a hulking mercenary named Kruger (played by an almost unrecognizable Sharlto Copley from District 9) serves as a fitting antagonist. Props to Copley, who has proven he is able to play both a bumbling, nerdy government official and a terrifying, muscle-bound psychopath. It took me more than half the film to even recognize him (admittedly beneath a rather substantial beard) and then only with the help of a friend who was sitting next to me who let out a sudden gasp of recognition. It appears that Copley is a very versatile actor, and has a promising career ahead.

As an action movie Elysium is a success; but as a story, it has problems. The themes and world are too under-explored for the ending to do much besides make you ask a million questions the film isn’t ever going to answer. If it was just an action movie, we wouldn’t necessarily need answers, but since Elysium purports to offer solutions to modern-day socio-political problems, I have to ask. How did Elysium the space station come to exist? Do most people there approve of Jodie Foster’s cold-blooded methods? Is all earth an over-crowded slum, of just LA? How exactly does it all work—are we meant to understand that all the rich people in the world came together to build a space station just for them? Did the governments of all their respective countries just go along with it? Why is it that the villain fights with knives and katanas when laser guns are available? (Ok, so maybe that last one isn’t that important). Most pressing of all—if it’s so easy to fly to Elysium (a shuttle full of armed heroes does it with no problem late in the film, since Elysium’s only defense against intruders appears to be one man with a missile launcher who lives in Los Angeles), who hasn’t it been overrun long before the coming of Matt Damon?

 

There are a lot of scenes in the movie that work, and even do what Blomkamp wanted—feel highly emotional and highly relevant. A terrible workplace accident caused by a callous CEO had me cringing in my seat. Another scene in which Damon confronts a robotic patrol officer offers a frustrating, Kafka-esque look at the bureaucracy. The entire first forty-five minutes of the movie (i.e., the moments before the fight scenes start) succeed at setting a bleak and mood of righteous indignation. But instead of running strong to the finish line, Elysium hobbles there, hamstrung by ham-fisted setting and characterization, and far too many logical leaps. Maybe an extended cut can succeed in fleshing out Elysium’s world and providing a better context for all that thrilling action. But if not, Elysium will have to be just a pretty good summer blockbuster, not the insightful look at class relations it seems to want to be.

 

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Looper

Looper is a movie with a lot of heart and not much brain.

What do I mean by that? Well, time travel is confusing. To do  a movie about it right requires a great deal of thought, planning, and meticulous attention to detail. Or, in the case of Looper, a single scene in which Bruce Willis tells his younger self: “I don’t want to talk about time travel. Because if we start talking about time travel we’d be here all day talking about it.” He isn’t really talking to his younger self: he’s talking to the audience. “All this time travel crap,” a character says at an earlier point of the film “it’ll fry your brain like an egg.”

If that sounds like a piss-poor excuse for the movie’s many time travel related plot holes, well, it is. The central premise of the movie is, in fact, a time paradox that is logically impossible if you think about it for a few seconds. I will explain why, but there are going to be a few spoilers.

The idea of Looper is that  Joe (Bruce Willis) goes back in time to kill a future, super-powered, telekinetic gangster called the Rainmaker as a child–sort of like the Terminator. Bruce Willis’ younger self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) sees him about to shoot this child down in front of his mother and realizes that the boy his older self wishes to destroy will escape, but end up a super-powered, traumatized orphan with a thirst for revenge and no moral guidance. It’s a great plot twist at first glance–see, by going back to stop the rainmaker, Joe actualyl created him. It’s a time loop.

Except it’s not, because if old Joe traveling through time was the one who created the Rainmaker (right in front of young Joe’s eyes) than surely young Joe, upon growing old, would remember this. And if he doesn’t remember it, then the only explanation is that the Rainmaker was originally not created by Joe at all–but then the whole drama of the movie is lost.

SPOILERS END

The central premise of Looper is nonsensical as well. We are meant to believe that time travel was invented by gangsters in the future and the only thing they could think to do with it was send victims back in time to get assassinated–basically, time travel is nothing to these gangsters but a convenient form of corpse removal. That’s it? Not going to pull a Back-to-the-Future 2 and send someone back to place a lot of key bets, thus ensuring your criminal organization will be loaded with cash forever? Not going to go back with futuristic technology and take over the past, setting yourself up as an evil crime lord dictator, or at worst, a very rich arms dealer? None of that? Really? Ok, corpse disposal it is, then.

If you want to murder people by sending them back in time, having a shoddy assassin waiting for the victim with a shotgun seems like a piss-poor way to do it when you could just send them back off a cliff, or into a pit, or the ocean. Why do Loopers even need to exist? Forcing troubled young men with crappy shotguns to shoot their older selves out in a cornfield where no one is watching seems like a recipe for fuck-ups if ever there was one.

It’s all (mostly) ok, though, because Looper isn’t really a movie about time travel. It’s not even really an action movie.

This trailer is a lie

It’s a drama/love story focusing on a deeply tortured young man suffering from serious mommy issues who learns to become a better person. Though Looper fails across the board at portraying the logical aspects of time travel, it does get the emotional aspects 100% right. It raises a number of ethical questions–is it ok to murder an innocent child if you are afraid that child might grow up to be a telekinetic Hitler? It creates a fascinating dynamic between its three leads (Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon Levitt, and Emily Blunt) all of whom are the sort of complex, emotionally raw characters I wish this sort of sci-fi thriller had more of. And on top of it all, Looper is a movie with a message about the redemptive power of love that, while obvious, doesn’t ever attempt to force its way down your throat and is delivered with a large degree of grace.

Looper does an excellent job easing you into its story and world, with an early montage giving us a good look at the life of young Joe–a lifeo f violence and debauchery, a life with no thought for the future and a lack of real emotional connection in the present. Though Joe is certainly not a good character, he is one we can understand, and, as he changes throughout the film, relate to. For turning a thriller into a character study (with enough action to keep everyone happy, though not enough to justify its misleading trailer), I commend Looper. If it had to choose between coherent logic and an emotionally investing story, I suppose it made the right choice, though of course it’s a shame we couldn’t have both.

The Thing (2011)

 

John Carpenter’s The Thing was a great horror movie with a premise—a shapeshifting alien monster infiltrating and picking off a small group of people—that combined a grotesque, creepy monster with a mood of paranoia and mystery. How was a Thing? How could you be sure? When would some character suddenly grow tentacles and start wreaking havoc?

Furthermore, it was that rare sort of premise that actually seemed to beg for sequels, or at least spin-offs. It’s pretty simple—all you have to do is take the same monster, and stick it in another environment with a group of interesting characters, and voila! A great horror film.

Unfortunately, the 2011 remake/prequel/thing managed to do everything wrong. It sacrificed the element that made the original great—the uncertainty, the mystery of not knowing who was a Thing and who wasn’t—and instead opted for the cheapest trick in the horror movie handbook: the jump scare.

Jump scares work, in that they startle you, frighten you for perhaps a second, and make you, well, jump. But they’re a cheap and easy alternative to actual terror, the sort you can only create by developing interesting characters, and creating a mood of claustrophobia and entrapment. One has to wonder why anyone would bother making a thing remake, if they weren’t even going to properly utilize their star monster’s ability to perfectly mimic any human being. The answer is both obvious and depressing—the Thing, a recognizable brand name with a strong base of fans, sells more tickets than some random movie about an ugly alien stabbing a bunch of scientists with a tentacle would otherwise.

This film’s second unpardonable offense is that it steals so heavily from the Carpenter version. Rather than trying to do something creative and original with a good premise, the brains behind this poor excuse for a prequel instead seem content to copy entire scenes from the 1986 film. The Thing’s best and most exciting moment is when two groups of people face off along a hallway, aiming flamethrowers at each other, each convinced the other is a Thing. It’s a ray of brightness in an otherwise bland movie, but we’ve seen it all before. Which begs the question: why did this new “thing” movie even need to exist?

It’s not all bad. Some of the creature effects are downright creepy, especially when the monster is portrayed as a frightening mix of human and alien. When it comes to spine-tingling death scenes and pure ickiness, it comes close to the older version. Unfortunately, the characters are all so bland and underdeveloped, with the possible exception of the protagonist, it’s hard to tell one from another, and hard to get worked up when anyone dies.

A final death blow to the film is the fact that it misses the easy chance to have a decent ending—hell, the ending was practically handed to them on a silver platter. One of the only scenes this “thing” prequel didn’t steal from the original film was the very first one in the movie, when a Norwegian is gunned down because the Americans believe he is shooting at them, when in fact he is merely trying to kill a dog that is actually a horrible alien in disguise. If the movie had ended with this scene, audiences new to the Thing universe would have been left with a moderately clever twist ending in which the monster actually gets away, the implication being that it will then murder the unsuspecting Americans. Instead, the film cuts out about a minute shy of this moment. Maybe the filmmakers were assuming audiences had seen the original and would draw these implications themselves—but if they were assuming their target audience had already seen Carpenter’s The Thing, why create a carbon copy of the original, instead of giving the fans of the older movie something fresh? In short, this is a movie that is designed to appeal to no one—neither the fans of the Carpenter movie nor those going to see a stand-alone horror film. This Thing isn’t as bad as it could have been, I suppose, but it is not even a shade as good as it could have been, either, and that is truly a shame.

Super 8

Super 8 has to be just about the only blockbuster this summer that’s not a sequel, in 3D, or based on a comic book. And that makes it so very special. It’s a reminder that not everyone in the movie industry has forgotten that they can make up their own characters and stories. Not to say that Super 8 is entirely original. In fact, the twist at the end is so typical by now that it would have been more surprising if it hadn’t happened. Still, there’s no denying that this movie is a welcome relief. Maybe a few filmmakers will take the hint and stop desperately resorting to ever more obscure comic book superheroes to fill the summer’s movie quota. Seriously? Thor? You guys are getting pretty desperate.

The movie Super 8 revolves around a group of kids, who, while filming a zombie movie that, chance upon the mother of all train wrecks. Seriously. It’s like train-mageddon. A pick-up hits the train head-on, and ka-boom! CGI everywhere.  Somehow out plucky heroes manage to avoid the giant fireballs, tumbling steel trailers, and raining debris without sustaining so much as a scratch. Not only are they unhurt, they go back to witty one-liners and amusing bickering about five seconds later. Until a scary black man (who somehow survived a head-on collision with a military train) tells them not to tell anyone or the baddies will kill them for what they’ve seen. Which turns out not to be true, by the way, since the baddies in question merely capture them later. But I guess kill sounded more foreboding. Anyway, after hearing this proclamation and having the black dude chase them away at gunpoint, the kids get a little nervous. Still, no breaking down, no crying, no PTSD. These are some pretty hardened, badass little kids.

It turns out the train wreck was only the beginning. You see, inside the train was an alien, and when the train crashed, the alien managed to punch its way out through the wall and is running around the town, wreaking havoc. You may wonder why the alien needed to wait until the train was derailed before punching through the wall. I don’t know.

Anyway, since the movie-makers obviously what Super 8 to be as mysterious as possible, I won’t give away any more of the plot. Suffice it to say that the plot is pretty good. Not exceptional, but decent for a monster-thriller.

You will not know what this movie is about until you see it, JJ Abrams has decreed it.

What is exceptional is the character development and the dialogue. Far too many movies centered around children force us to endure characters that, instead of being endearing and comical, come off as obnoxious and cliched. These kids are not. The humor is funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but sort of chuckle-and-grin funny. It’s like if Quentin Tarantino wrote a movie about children.

Like a boatload of disaster thrillers, this movie features a subplot involving an estranged father and son who manage to re-discover their love for each other. It also features a romance. Again, these plot elements are a lot better handled than in a lot of movies. When the character development is taking place, you don’t feel bored. You don’t want to yell at the screen to just get back to the action already. These touching scenes ARE a part of the action, and just as involving as the big scary monster moments.

Unfortunately, this movie commits what I consider the cardinal sin of thrillers and horror films everywehre–it resorts to jump scares. Lots of them. Worse, it resorts to LOUD jump scares.

The thing about jump scares is this: they’re easy. Everyone knows that you can play a supper loud noise after a long quiet pause and people will jump. And wince as their eardrums throb in anguish.

See? It’s easy…

Honestly, though, doing this over and over again–it’s lazy. It’s the cheapest and most obnoxious means possible of scaring people, if you can really call it scaring. I call it startling. And it detracts from the movie when you have to cover your ears to protect them from the next big bang or crash that you just know is coming.

Apart from that, though, the movie s a pretty fun ride. Almost all of it, at least. The climax, as I said before, is a little cheesy and predictable, and it feels a bit like the ending of a Disney movie. Which would be fine, I guess, if this were a kids’ movie, but I can’t help but feel that if it were a kids’ movie they wouldn’t have had all those tedious jump scares.

Gotta give Super 8 props for its ending, though. It wraps everything up, and then–it ends. It just ends. No anti-climactic bullshit, just a nice,clean, fade to black. It’s a bold move, and I respect it. Hey, the story’s done, so do we really need to see a scene of everybody sitting around and talking about what happened? No. No, we most certainly don’t. Super 8 out with a bang, not a fizzle, and that is truly the way to go.

Oh, and during the credits? We finally get to see that zombie movie they were filming.

Serenity

Despite its name, Serenity is not very, well, serene. It contains a rather large quantity of explosions, fistfights, stabbings, and shoot-outs.

It’s a little tricky to review Serenity, since it is trying to be two things at once. Serenity is in fact a sequel to a TV show named Firefly, a space western (in a very literal sense of the phrase) documenting the adventures of the crew of the Serenity, a smuggling ship. Featuring well-drawn characters and snappy dialogue, the show was a true gem of sci-fi adventure. Sadly, it was cancelled before the first season could be finished. The reason for this? Fox network, apparently not understanding how plots work, decided to air Firefly’s episodes out of order, with the goal of airing more action-packed episodes first in order to entice their viewers. The result, needless to say, was a confused, muddled mess that was impossible o follow. That’s the tricky thing about plots. They have to go in a certain order, or things just don’t make sense. Yet some fans managed to piece together the plot despite Fox’s carelessness, and somehow I guess these fans managed to persuade someone to make a big-screen, big-budget sequel.

But I digress. Serenity, the movie, tries to wrap up all the hanging plot threads left unresolved at the end of Firefly and give the disappointed fans of the show some sort of closure. Yet it also attempts to stand on its own as a space action film. This is evident in the way that all the western-ey elements that made the firefly show so zany and just plain weird are gone from Serenity. There are no horses or cows, no cowboy pistols or country dances. Serenity looks and feels more like Star Wars than Firefly. The goal of these changes is to make the universe of Serenity more accessible to viewers unfamiliar to the show. At the same time, a lot of the character drama in the movie is hard to follow unless you’re already familiar with who these people are from watching Firefly. It’s a tricky balancing act, and Serenity pulls it off…mostly.

While watching this movie, I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who’d never seen the show. To look at Serenity with unbiased eyes. And what I saw was a fun, exciting adventure movie…with a few really confusing subplots that seemed crudely tacked on, and some melodramatic scenes that weren’t built up to nearly enough. Those who’ve seen Firefly will find these moments profoundly touching. Those who haven’t may wonder why these scenes made it off the cutting room floor. To be honest, Serenity isn’t going to pack a real emotional punch if you haven’t watched Firefly. But it can still be enjoyed. It’s got snappy dialogue, a pretty good plot, and some really good one-liners. Not to mention some really good fisticuffs.

If you have seen Firefly, then this movie is probably going to rock your world. I’ve got to admit, it’s got its slow moments. There was a long segment in the middle where I found myself getting antsy. I thought to myself, Jesus, they’ve only got two hours to deal with and they’ve barely moved the plot anywhere. Can they actually tell a story in the time that’s left? Is this actually going somewhere?

The answer is yes. The film rebounds and closes with a magnificent third act. We get to see space marines fighting zombie-psycho-rapist-swordsmen things, a black ninja fighting the captain, a big space battle, and an epic last stand. Not to mention the resolution of a few romantic subplots. And the last scene is genuinely heartwarming instead of cheesy, due to skillful writing on the part of Joss Whedon. Well done, movie.

It’s a rare movie that manages to appease both fans and newcomers without sacrificing the integrity of its source material or dumbing down its characters. Serenity is that rare movie. Firefly goes out with a bang.

Star Trek (the new one)

Star Trek is the most unexciting exciting movie I’ve ever seen.

I admit, that doesn’t really make sense. Allow me to explain. Star Trek is confusing because it seems as though it should be exciting. Riveting, in fact. It has all the necessary components of excitingness. It’s got big space ship battles, some suspenseful scenes, planets getting blown up, and time travel. And somehow in the midst of all that, it finds time to squeeze in some much-appreciated character development. But despite all its efforts, Star Trek faisl to weave these ingredients together to make a compelling whole. The movie ends up just being sort of…okay. It’s a fun thing to watch on a Friday night on Netflix if you finish studying early, but not really anything to get worked up about.

Part of Star Trek’s problem is that its action scenes feel, for the most part, uninspired. While the effects are dazzling enough, the fight choreography and stunt work is mostly lackluster, except for one pretty awesome scene involving swordfighting and a giant drill, which, unfortunately, comes in the first half of the movie. The climax is especially underwhelming. The shoot-out between the baddies and Kirk and SPock feels perfunctory, and the method by which they end up triumphing (I’d call that a spoiler, but come on, we all know who’s going to win) is a pretty big case of Deus Ex Machina. The Enterprise wins not through cleverness or combat, but through technobabble and a series of coincidences so contrived they kill your suspension of disbelief and then dismember its corpse with a machete. Basically, it all comes down to this. Kirk is beamed down to an ice planet and just happens to stumble upon a cave containing the future version of Spock, who tells him what he needs to defeat the bad guys. Are we supposed to just accept that they just happened to bump into each other? There’s been times I’ve failed to find my friend at a Wal-Mart, and this is a whole planet we’re talking about here. Then, as if things weren’t unlikely enough, they go to get help from the Star Trek officer stationed on the planet, and he just happens to be Scotty (as in, beam me up, Scotty), some kind of super-genius who invents some kind of magic teleporter thing. Well, that was convenient.

Another problem is the villain, Nero. It’s been said that a film is only as good as its villain, and if that’s true, it might explain why Star Trek is only okay. Nero is about as memorable and inspiring as a trip to the grocery store. His motivation is questionable at best, and evidence of severe mental retardation at worst. His only defining qualities are his tattoos, his weird eyebrows, and his awkward dialogue. I don’t get this guy. Is he supposed to be taken seriously? Is he supposed to be funny? All I can say is, he ain’t no Darth Vader.

Kirk and Spock, the only characters with all that much to do, are good in their roles, but at times they feel a little like caricatures of themselves. We get it, movie. Kirk is arrogant and reckless. Spock is logical and cold. We understand. You’ve made it painfully clear. Can we move on, now?

On the technical level, Star Trek is a mix of hit and misses. The gravity and black hole effects are cool, as ar the laser beams. The music is rousing. But the camera-work is just plain annoying. I guess they blew all their budget on computer effects and had to buy really cheap cameras, because the number of lens flares in this movie is ridiculous. Seriously, it’s distracting. There’s a lens flare in just about every scene. There’s a lens flare in pretty much EVERY SHOT on the bridge of the Enterprise (where a lot of the movie takes place). Sometimes two or more in the same shot. I’ve never seen so many lens flares in my entire life. I suppose the director was trying to add a feeling of realism into the movie, but after a while I forgot what was going on and began to focus on the colors flashing in my face, counting the number of seconds that elapsed between one lens flare and the next.

Seriously, count the lens flares…and this isn’t even on the Enterprise yet…

The film has enough to make it worth a watch. A few fun scenes, some good music and effects, and a decent, if corny, story involving time travel and parallel universes. But it doesn’t have the same excitement and wonder as, say, the first Star Wars film (that’s Episode IV, not I, I’m talking about). It never brings you to the edge of your seat, but it’s not boring, either.