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+

After Earth

Sometimes, I feel some people are too hard on some movies. The internet has made everyone and their mother a cynic and has given them a platform to express their cynicisms. Hell, I used to be one and every now and then my cynical side comes back out, like a relapse for a recovering alcoholic. But mostly, I try to find the good in things and try to enjoy them for what they are. M. Night Shyamalan is a big target for the cynics. And apparently, his new film "After Earth" is no exception.

Not even The Fresh Prince can save him.

I feel as though M. Night Shyamalan is the Nickelback of the film industry. Everyone makes fun of him, but only a handful know why they do. The rest are just followers of the pack. Now, I'm not saying all of his movies are amazing. I'm just saying he was dealt a crappy hand. His first two major movies, "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were arguably both masterpieces. I tend to agree with that sentiment. But since his two movies were fantastic, everyone expected every movie he made to be fantastic. And that is just statistically impossible. I mean, even Spielberg made "1941" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull".

Although, I mainly blame George Lucas for that one.

P.S. This was the tamest picture of this episode I could find.

Perhaps I just have a soft spot in my heart for M. Night Shyamalan. He's a fellow Philadelphian, and I first decided to do something with film as my career while watching "The Village". 

Yes, I like that movie. Deal with it!

I don't think any of his movies are as bad as everyone says. I also believe whoever did his marketing between "The Village" and "The Happening" was the worst marketer in the history of films. If you watch "The Happening" with the minds set that it is an homage to B-movies, it becomes much better.

However, there is no excuse for "The Last Airbender". That's just terrible.

Anyway. Where were we?

Oh, that's right! Thanks Will!

"After Earth" is a coming of age story of Katai, the son of a legendary soldier named Cypher. Katai and his father find themselves left on Earth, now inhabited by wild life and an atmosphere that has evolved to kill humans. Their already strained relationship is tested as Cypher, unable to walk, guides his son through the landscape to the tail of their ship where he must retrieve the beacon that will send a distress signal back to their home planet.

Once again, pre-maturely sabotaged by poor reviews, "After Earth" is yet another one of M. Night Shyamalan's decent films that is attacked by the cynics of the world. I mean, it has a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes as of June 3rd, 2013, while "Oblivion" has a 55%. At least "After Earth" isn't a blatant rip off of a movie that was released less than 5 years ago. This movies got off to a slow start, but once it got going, it became very suspenseful.

This movie won't be the best movie of the year. It probably isn't even the best movie of the week. (I still have yet to see "Now You See Me") But it is far from deserving of the hate it is already receiving, much like most of Shyamalan's previous projects. But I guess people hate you when you make movies you want to make rather than being told by the studio what movies you should make.

LEAVE M. NIGHT ALONE!!!!!!

My Grade: B-

Oblivion

Warning: If you have seen the movie "Moon" this review will contain spoilers for "Oblivion" and visa versa.

In "Oblivion", the world has been destroyed in a war with an alien species. The humans won the war but were forced to evacuate the planet and find refuge on on of Saturn's moons. Tom Cruise, being the bad-ass he thinks he is , works on Earth fixing drones that take protect giant machines that convert Earths water into energy.

But nothing is as it seems. Tom Cruise is actually a clone tricked into thinking he is a human to give him the motivation to do his slave work. He only has two weeks left on his contract, and since he is a clone, instead of going home, he will be exterminated and replaced by a new clone. Hmm... sounds familiar...

OK, "Oblivion" does have some differences from "Moon". In "Oblivion", instead of humans controlling the clones, it's an Alien, triangle, pyramid thingy. (What?)

If we had made it round,  it would have looked like the 

Death Star and people would have known

 this movie wasn't original.

"Oblivion" was enjoyable, but the main problem with is is that I just kept think of how much better "Moon" was. And that was very distracting. It's kind of like seeing a Led Zeppelin cover band. It's good, but you know what you really want.

At least I got to look at Olga Kurylenko for two hours.... MMM!

MMM-MMM-MMM

My Grade: B-

Looper

How funny would it be if Joseph Gordon-Levitt was nominated for an Oscar for playing a young Bruce Willis before Bruce Willis got nominated for an Oscar at all?

Granted, I'm sure Bruce Willis doesn't care about Oscars. After all, he is John McClane.

Looper, starring the above mentioned, takes place in the not-so-distant future where time travel has not been invented yet. However, there are hit-men called Loopers, who are employed by people in the future where time travel has been invented, but outlawed. They use the time machines to send people they want dead back into the past to be killed and disposed of. But when a new criminal is running the futuristic world, he starts sending Loopers back and having them killed by their younger selves.

One day a Looper named Joe comes face-to-face with his older self, and hesitates allowing... uh...his older self to.... get away from... his younger self.

Younger Joe's bosses start hunting him to fix the mess, but Joe hides from them while older Joe looks for the new boss who killed his wife and sent him back to kill him as a child.

I have no idea how the hell Rian Johnson, the writer and director of this movie, pitched this or summarized the script. He's a genius for doing so, because I feel stupid just trying to explain it. But this is also why he is a big-time director and I am a guy writing a blog... I'm a failure.

Some of you may remember Rian Johnson from his first feature Brick, also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. His writing style is unique and with enough chances could become as iconic as any other writer/director. And if you haven't seen Brick yet, do yourself a favor and do.

Anyways, this movie was not anything that I expected. I thought it would be more about the older and younger Bruce Willis characters fighting each other, but it had more to that. That was only a small part of this story. There was also a lot more to the characters than I thought there would be.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was unrecognizable as a younger Joe. He has Bruce Willis' mannerisms down so well that it wasn't hard to forget who he was and let myself be engulfed in the story.

I should note that Paul Dano, who plays Joe's friend Seth, though he played a small part, was fantastic. Not many actors can take a small part and make it memorable, but that's exactly what Dano did.

Looper is a great sci-fi movie that I'm sure will be remembered for quite some time.

My Grade: A-