VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE Volume 2.1 October 2013 | Page 10

Review

Review of Elysium:
30 Minutes Into the Future
Neill Blompkamp’s latest sci-fi thriller seemed at a
glance to have started with a solid base: a healthy dose
of CGI, a cast of well-known stars and a slew of social
issues to tackle. It follows the journey of Max de Costa,
an ex-convict on parole seeking to cure himself of a
deadly affliction by travelling to the titular Elysium. All
the ingredients you need to cook up another successful
blockbuster right? However, the movie had quite a few
shortcomings before it can truly call itself a postsummer blockbuster. With glaring plot-holes and sometimes boring visuals, this is one movie sci-fi enthusiasts
can go without. Before starting to read this review,
please note this review contains ¬ Spoilers¬ , you have
been warned.
Despite being set approximately 130 years in the future, viewers would find themselves extremely familiaror perhaps even bored - by the environments of this
movie. Apparently, in the view of Neil Blompkamp,
architects and interior designers will have been rendered
extinct by the end of this decade, leaving the richest 1%
of the future’s people to live in the stagnation of early
21st century architectural designs. Earth, on the other
hand, had been blown back right into pre-oil Dubai,
filled with nothing but sand covering the landscape and
dotted with pitiful hovels awkwardly stranded on the
skeletal remains of old buildings. The main point of the
style, of course, was to draw a parallel between future
Earth and the present. However, being a self-professed
Sci-Fi fan, Blompkamp’s vision of the future seem ridiculously tame and, for a lack of a better word, uninspired
and lacking compared to other sci-fi vistas such as the
lush jungles of Avatar or the colossal juggernauts of

9

By Richard Wen

Pacific Rim. The robotic and digital technology did
little to mediate this problem, looking plain, and even
simplistic in comparison to modern visions of Science Fiction.
The plot, despite promising to tackle social issues
such as illegal immigration and universal health care,
was ultimately riddled with plot-holes and
one-dimensional characterization. Max, the main
character of Elysium, was set up as a Jesus-like figure
from the start, with gold-filtered flashbacks and a
religious mentor figure. His boss, the CEO of
Armadyne, was a cold, self-interested person who
was too proud to even breath the same air as the
people from “down below.” Other stereotypes also
included the equally frosted, ice queen Secretary of
Defense Delacourt and the mentally hinged, ex-rapist
and convict Kruger alongside his equally triggerhappy crew. Instead of cleverly subverting these clichés, Elysium plays them straight to the end, never
taking a moment to give more than a single definitive
facet to these characters. And yes, before anyone
would asks, Max’s “true” nice guy companion does
die in the beginning.
Ultimately, Elysium was another Hollywood movie with an interesting concept but in the end floundered with its execution. As a cinematic experience it
was boring and uninspired, and as a story it was pretentious and filled with glaring stereotypes. If anyone
was waiting for another thoughtful sci-fi experience,
then this certainly wasn’t the movie they were looking for.