Review of Elysium (2013) by Notwist — 09 Aug 2013

I don't know what I was expecting. Walking into the theatre watching a movie with Matt Damon (The Bourne Trilogy) playing the protagonist really is a type of contract. Still, for some reason I was expecting smart sci-fi, because this is after all the guy who made District 9, right? Well, except for the larger frame story (Rich People Escaped the Polluted Earth) there is no trace of what made District 9 good.

This is a pure action movie, and if that is what you like you'll probably like this movie. For me, it was not what I expected. I did not expect watching Matt Damon running around firing different future-modded rifles for an hour. I did not expect the last half hour of the movie being one of those drawn out sequences where the protagonist is fighting towards the end goal ever so slowly. I did not expect this movie to be so insanely predictable.

The worst part by far about this movie though is the characters. There is not a single relatable character in this movie, and I found myself several times really not caring what happened even to the cutest token child characters in the story. The most interesting character in this whole movie was the villain, who is a South African (the only similarity to District 9 in the whole movie) mercenary previously convicted of rapes and murders. Someone with a hint of script writing skills would have made this almost interesting character somewhat deeper by rounding off the edges of his "Absolute Bad Guy" persona, but that takes some thought, which is outside the objective of this movie.

If you want to watch a good guy kill a bad guy and save humanity by shooting at stuff for one and a half hour, go watch this movie. If you're expecting anything like District 9, don't.