Let’s be fair, this year so far has not been great for top notch films. If we were trying to make a list of particularly good films from this year, we would probably make it to about five and barely any would be from the summer box office period.
Summer cinema is woeful, we’re putting that out there. Sure, there is a film or two that makes the three to four months worth it, but more often than not, most of the bigger blockbusters are over-marketed, over-produced rubbish, many never being able to achieve that balance between emotional heart and special effects.
However, a couple of years ago, one film certainly came out of left out of field and was so impressive, it even made it to the Best Film Oscar nominations list. District 9, presented by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp, deservedly was named on many Best Film lists for 2009. The film managed to turn over a massive profit based on it’s 30 million budget and sent Blomkamp to the big leagues.
Although Blomkamp was behind quite a few shorts, District 9 was his first big feature, which subsequently put a lot of pressure on the director for his follow-up, Elysium.
Set in the year 2154, the story follows Matt Damon’s character Max from his early life when he dreams of departing for Elysium, a space station which resides above Earth where the elite of the world have abandoned their poorer neighbours. Max has tried to stay on the straight and narrow after a couple of brushes with the law, but following an accident at work which results in his robotic doctor giving him a finite period of time to live, Max goes to an underground gang to secure an illegal trip to Elysium.
On the space station, everything is perfect, their medical care so advanced that any disease can be cured within minutes. But in order for the society to operate on Elysium, they need to make sure the poor and ill stay on Earth while the rich live in the healthy lap of luxury. The main enforcer of the cruel immigration policy is Jodie Foster’s Delacourt, a woman hell-bent on keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. However, when Max sets a chain of events in motion in his attempt to get on to the space station to save his life, he disrupts a lot of plans for Delacourt and becomes too much of an inconvenience to ignore…
Elysium is arguably one of the smartest films from this year, not just because of the construction of the plot but the questions that it poses about where this world is going. Not that this hasn’t been done before, but Elysium presents these problems with a lot of slick storytelling.
Matt Damon is, as he usually is, reliably brilliant. However, Jodie Foster’s every appearance throughout the film is enraging, not only does she seem to relish the role and overplay it, the dubbing of her voice is slightly out of time making it infuriating to sit through her scenes.
The biggest problem Elysium suffers from is how long it takes to actually get going, the tension wears thin half way through a running time which feels a lot longer than its 109 minutes. On top of that, the gear change is surprising, and on occasions brutal.
Despite its problems, Elysium is still well worth checking out and at the moment, sits as the best film for this summer.
