The Competent But Uncompelling ELYSIUM, This Week's Sci-Fi Summer Flick

Now playing at nearly every multiplex in America:

ELYSIUM (Dir. Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to his 2009 Oscar-nominated DISTRICT 9, a late addition to this summer’s sci-fi spectacular sweepstakes, is #1 at the box office right now. It’s also received better reviews than the likewise themed OBLIVION, and AFTER EARTH (that last one wasn’t too hard), but it still felt all too routine to me. 

Set in the dystopian future (is there ever any other kind of future in the movies?) of 2154, in which Earth has become a third world planet, with the rich people having relocated to the luxurious orbital habitat of the title. “Elysium” looks like the bicycle-wheel shaped space station in 2001: A SPACE ODDYSEY, except that it contains a lush green utopia in which violins are always playing, while well dressed people lounge around sipping wine all day.

Sporting a shaved head, and careful not to flash his blinding grin too often, Matt Damon stars as an earth-dwelling ex-con who has dreamed of going to Elysium since he was a kid played by Maxwell Perry Cotton. Damon pines for Alice Braga as a nurse with a daughter (Emma Tremblay) dying of leukemia. Braga wants to take Tremblay to the luxurious city in the sky, because every mansion there is equipped with Med Pods, magic medicine machines identical to the auto-surgery machines in PROMETHEUS, that can cure any disease.

After getting radiation poisoning from an accident at his factory job, and learning he will die in 5 days if not treated, Damon makes a deal with a shaggy smuggler (Brazilian actor Wagner Moura), that involves stealing valuable info from the mind of evil Elysium CEO (a suitably chilling William Fichtner).

The real villain of this bloated action exercise is Sharlto Copley, who was the hero in DISTRICT 9, but here is an over-the-top mercenary agent, working for a ruthless Jodie Foster as the power-hungry Secretary of Defense.

Running around in a role that doesn’t require a lot of acting, Damon puts in a workmanlike performance (much of it outfitted in a heavy robotic exoskeleton), but the energetically ragged Moura steals the show as the smuggler/revolutionary “Spider.” If only the movie had the passion and edge to equal Moura’s.

In noisy MAD MAX-style fight-scenes and chases, the sun-splashed CGI is convincing, but the story that’s supposed to immerse us into all this spectacle is sorely lacking. Nothing that Damon, Moura, and Braga face when they get to Elysium amounts to much, and Sharlto’s yelling of his simplistic and clichéd dialogue kept getting on my nerves.

Foster’s odd accent that made me think she may have studied Carrie Fisher’s weird half British, half American accent in STAR WARS (still not calling it A NEW HOPE! Never!), and her character’s arc is really underdeveloped.

That’s another element that makes it seem like Blomkamp should’ve written another draft of the screenplay before going into production. The political perspective is nowhere as polished as in DISTRICT 9, and the over-formulaic feel of the narrative is hard to shake.

Still, in Moura’s performance, the fast frantic pacing (it certainly isn’t boring), and the effective imagery, there may be enough pluses to make it worth matinee admission.

ELYSIUM is a competent, but uncompelling popcorn picture, but in these Dog Days of summer, it may be one of your best bets at the multiplex.

More later...

A Failed Attempt At Redemption Through Puppetry

THE BEAVER (Dir. Jodie Foster, 2011)

So, here's this film's story - a toy company CEO is in a deep dark funk. He's uncommunicative with his wife and kids, and his business is faltering. His wife kicks him out of the house. While discarding some of his things, he finds an old ratty beaver puppet in a dumpster and puts it on his left arm, During a drunken night in his hotel room with 2 failed suicide attempts, he crashes onto the floor with a TV falling down on him.



When he awakes his puppet gives him a pep talk, and immediately he starts to get his life back together. "The Beaver," as it wants to be called, is now calling the shots to the puzzlement of his family and the employees.



Got that? Not sure I do. What makes it so hard to swallow is that Mel Gibson plays the despondent puppeteer. Gibson's popularity has waned in recent years because of famously controversial behavior, and part of this film's hype is that it could re-boot his career.



Don't count on it. This film, inexplicably directed by Jodie Foster (also appearing as Gibson's wife), is a dreary experience that has no insights into depression, delusion, or beaver puppets.



You might expect a comedy from a scenario where a man communicates only through a puppet, with a thick Cockey accent, but as The Beaver says at one point: "There's nothing funny about it."



There's a subplot involving Gibson's son (Anton Yelchin) dealing with teen angst through a budding romance with Jennifer Lawrence (WINTER'S BONE) as a valedictorian cheerleader who hires him to write her graduation speech. It really doesn't fit, but then nothing in this film fits.



The implausibility factor here is overwhelming, and not just from the basic premise. When Gibson develops and markets a bestselling wood-cutting kit, it hits such a false note that it's deafening. Likewise Foster's one-note reaction to her husband's dementia.



An unpleasant sex scene with Foster getting creeped out by the puppet is another scene that doesn't gel.



I'm not a fan of Gibson, but there were times his performance showed real effort and passion. However it's in vain as this is strained, self conscious material that never clicks.



In the last third, THE BEAVER takes some disturbing and drastic turns that don't add up, especially when considering how tidy the ending is.



What first time screenwriter Kyle Killen, and Foster were going for here beats me.

Basically this film is a bunch of bad ideas desperately assembled in a lame attempt to form an inspirational story.



It's a failure as a comeback project for Gibson, and will probably be only remembered as a weird misguided movie that came and went with little fanfare. That is, if it's remembered at all.



More later...