In Elysian Fields.

I have almost nothing to say about Elysium. It came and it went and I’ve not thought about it much since, which is a shame because it has a visionary director, a strong cast, big money, superior effects and an interesting premise. So what went wrong? Well, it sets itself up as a film about class war and then does nothing with it. The rich will abandon us, the poor will get poorer, life will get cheaper. Yeah, and? The film doesn’t really know. It pats itself on the back for having pointed inequality out and then gets on with the business of showing people in robot suits hitting each other….because we haven’t had enough films like that recently. We’re supposed to care about Matt Damon’s character because he had a childhood sweetheart who now has a sick child, he’s a nice guy in the ghetto, a hard worker who talks back to robots. There’s a villain called Kruger who’s a kind of Terminator throwback. He has an impenetrable South African accent, almost as impenetrable as Jodie Foster’s performance. What film did she think she was making? She has the worst lines in the film, pushes buttons and walks down corridors in a power suit. She should be doing better work than this. Everything stays at a very simplistic level except the violence which is taken to excess and that in the end is the problem; too much reliance on brawn rather than brains.