Elysium

After I saw "District 9", I had a slight obsession with Neill Blomkamp. I thought he showed great promise as a director and I couldn't wait for his next movie. Needless to say, I was extremely excited when I heard about "Elysium". Then I heard that Eminem was a possibility for the main role. As far as rapper-actors go, Eminem isn't terrible, but seriously? Eminem? Luckily he refused to be in the movie if they couldn't film in Detroit and Matt Damon got the role.

"Elysium" takes place in a futuristic world in which all of Earth is devastated from overpopulation and everywhere looks like the slums of Mumbai. The rich leave the planet to live on a space station called Elysium (OOOOOOH, That's why it's called that!) to obtain their way of life. Thus creating a not-so-subtle metaphor for the failed "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

1% of the People have 100% of the free Healthcare not 

performed by a guy with tattoos or robots. I am the 99%!!!

Max finds himself pumped with radiation in an accident at his work and is only given 5 days to live. He sets off on a mission to get up to Elysium to use one of their Medical Bays, a machine that can fix any ailment just by spinning around you. Modern Medicine has it all wrong! No Pills! Just have a Machine spin around you to fix cancer, AIDs and Whooping Cough!!!

The only thing it doesn't fix is bad ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement)

As high as my expectations were for this movie, I was only slightly disappointed. It was still a great movie. Better than a lot of the crap out there this summer. And none of my problems were with the story. It was all with the Audio. There were a lot of scenes where they had ADR, which to most people, is unnoticeable. But thanks to Film School, I don't have the privilege to ignore it anymore. Jodie Foster in particular had a lot of ADR. I've heard a lot of people say she was bad in this movie, but what I think people are confusing with bad acting is the bad ADR. But you can't notice something that you're unaware of. She wasn't terrible, just her audio was.

Sharlto Copley returned to Neill Blomkamp's set, but this time as a villain. And he was quite awesome as usual. He was evil, bad ass and funny all at the same time. This guy impresses me with every movie he's in and I'm glad he's getting the recognition and work he deserves.

"Elysium", although not as good as I had hoped, was a fun and thrilling movie that was more original than any other summer movie other there this year. More movies need to do that. As safe as reboots of old Western TV shows from the late 1940s may seem, (I'm looking at you Disney!), people will never appreciate remakes as much as they do originality. And that's not bashing all remakes. There are some phenominal remakes out there. It's just fact. Originality trumps remakes 10 out of 10 times.

Although, "Elysium" could be a rip-off of some obscure sci-fi movie that only 3 people have ever heard of and I could sound like a complete idiot to them right now.

My Grade: B+