Elysium review- by Mark Kermode on Youtube

Full text transcript of Elysium review

Elysium or Elysium is you keep wanting to say, I’ve said it once and then you corrected me. And as you know, I always take note of what you say. That will be the first. So latest from the Obama camp who made District nine, which I really like. Once again, this is a socially inflected science fiction movie. So it’s futuristic. I think it’s 21, 54 is the time the world is polluted and devastated and ravaged and the rich have basically fled to the sky. There is a huge, great big space station orbiting the earth called Elysium, where the air is clear, the living is good and the medical service is absolutely extraordinary. Every house has within it this kind of strange pod that if you have if anything breaks or you get ill and then you just go into this hole in the pod, fixes it. Meanwhile, down on earth, there’s pollution and strife and all that sort of thing. Matt Damon has grown up dreaming of getting the chance to go to Elysium. But the problem is you can’t get there unless you’re really, really rich. Then as a worker, he finds himself exposed to radiation, which we’re told will kill him in five days. This is a narrative device. You’ve got five days in which to, you know, do all the stuff that needs to be done. So he decides he has to get to Elysium. The only way he can do it is to agree Johnny Mnemonic style to allow his brain to be used as storage space by the resistance in order that he may serve a purpose for them whilst doing this. But, of course, the whole movie this is this is this is the set up. What he doesn’t realize is that he has more information than he’s had than he thinks.

Dad, you’ve never heard of this.

What is it we bought program for at least whoever has this has the power to override their whole system. Open the borders. Make everyone. Can save your life.

We can save everyone. When can I go? So there’s been a lot of discussion about, you know, Matt Damon because Matt Damon is a man with sort of big social conscience and Matt Damon wanting to do the film partly because of the fact that it’s you know, it’s a social commentary, stories about the rich and the poor, and it’s about the way in which, you know, revolutionary ideas of equality and it’s about health care. And it’s it all those things are basically hardwired into the story. And you kind of expect that from the guy who gave you District nine, which was in many ways a sort of political parable about about racism. And the film looks very handsome. I mean, it’s a kind of it’s a good looking movie you will have seen already from the from the clips of the trailers, you know that there’s obviously been some money invested and it has a great big A-list start. But on the other hand, it’s a popcorn movie. It’s a popcorn science fiction movie. And you think this sounds like a great combination. So it’s going to be, you know, enjoyable, entertaining, star driven, good to look at, but with deep, solid themes. And then you sit there watching it, thinking, why aren’t I finding this more rewarding, more interesting, just more engaging than it is? I like Matt Damon very much. I like the director very much. I like the idea. I like that kind of class war. I do science fiction as some kind of future. Like, of course, you know, I’m a sucker for all that stuff.

And the problem is that on one level, it’s a bit like listening to a studio produced album by a band that made a really good record in their garage. And then you think the next one’s going to be the same. Yet somehow it’s lost some of its charm. Somehow the edges have been taken off it. Somehow it just feels much more sort of, you know, contained and packaged. I mean, interestingly enough, the title, obviously, you know, you’ve had oblivion and you’ve got Elysium and people can confuse these ideas in their head. They’re all about the earth being ravaged. And there is that similar sense that you think, you know, there are things in it that are, you know, interesting to look at and work is science fiction, science fiction spectacle to some extent. But what it doesn’t do is engage you enough on a on a personal level and it starts to sort of trudge about 30 minutes in, which is a shame. Every now and then shelter returns. And whenever he’s on, everything kind of gets a lot better because he’s a lot more regin, a lot more spiky presence. But it’s not simply that I know some people think Matt Damon is not an engaging screen presence. I have no problem with him at all. I think he’s a perfectly engaging screen presence. It was just that I like the ideas. I like the director, I like the cast, I like the design. But I started thinking things like, why is it that every line of Jodie Foster’s looks like it’s been post sinked? Does did she decide to change her accent halfway through the filming? And once you start worrying about that sort of stuff, once you start worrying about is that actor’s lines dubbed all those actor’s lines? Do you think that’s it? The problem is the movie hasn’t captivated me.

And it’s funny. I’m a sucker for science fiction. I’m a sucker for the ideas. I like the actor. I like the director. But I have to admit, I found it a trudge. And it’s a shame because I wanted it to be sparkly and exciting. And it’s not terrible. It’s really not terrible. It’s just quite ordinary. So not even the class war aspect of it. Got you going. Well, that was as I said, that’s the thing that I thought, OK, this will drive it along. I’ll forgive it many scenes because it’s you know, it’s that’s what it’s about. And yet it just felt it felt stodgy. That’s not to say it’s bad. I think he’s a good director. And as I said, I like all the things about it. You know, what’s that thing about the sum of the parts is what is it? The the whole is less than that the other way around. Well, you have to think about that. It’s less than the sum of its parts. Yes, it is less the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Thank you for digging me out of that particular linguistic hole.