I think Jodie Foster’s dentures were falling out to come up with that accent. I thought that Elysium was 80% of the way to being a good movie. Damon did a good job but for some reason I just couldn’t buy him in that role.
I’ve read about it but haven’t seen it. Apparently a lot of the barren Earth scenes were shot in a real Mexican slum/garbage dump. I saw Damon talking about this and the social-political messages of the film blah blah blah, and all I could think was, “Gee Mr. Damon, don’t you think it’s a tad hypocritical to talk about that considering that you were probably making $50 to $100 per second to do your little play-acting thing for a couple weeks amongst the people who had to live there their whole lives?”
It worked for me. I think it would have made a better short-story than a movie, but I still liked it. I expect we will be seeing a LOT of exoskeletal suits at SF cons in the future, as doing something like that is going to be way easier than a full Stormtrooper suit.
Re: The robots being built on Earth… I don’t think those were scheduled to be shipped up to the station; if they’re programmed not to deal harshly with Elysium citizens, I can’t imagine they see much wear & tear other than just walking around and helping cats down out of trees; I think they were all slated to being used on Earth to keep all the minions in line.
What was the deal with Foster’s character dying because she refused medical help from Damon’s love interest? Was it supposed to be an act of conscience because she’d fucked up Elysium so badly with the mercs? Not wanting to be touched by one of those lowly earth scum, even to save her life? The script writers were tired of her?
I’d forgotten about that, it was strange. I’m not sure why she refused, other than so she wouldn’t be the main bad guy of the movie anymore.
Didn’t make any sense to us either. Like I said, nobody had any motivation for how they were behaving. None.
I got the impression that it was a mix of conscience attack & not wanting to go through the whole being tried & executed for treason after this was over. I also though her character was supposed to be French (the accent was still pretty bad). BTW how big would a space colony like Elysium actually need to be to keep it’s atmosphere in by gravity alone? :dubious: All the designs for Stanford tori I’ve seen have the habitat ring enclosed. Well except for the Ringworld, & some stuff inspired by it on Orion’s Arm.
Since they walk around normally, they must have gravity, rotational or artificial, that equals earth’s. It’s a pretty thin atmosphere though, there’s got to be a lot of other problems they have to deal with.
THAT plot point I’m willing to forgive. She bled out seconds after refusing help. I just figured she was just being pragmatic and realized she had no chance to make it to a pod or anywhere else.
Otherwise the movie was a pretty mess. As others have pointed out the medical pod situation was the biggest plot hole. It just wasn’t logical. Also the sheer level of technology represented by the pods actually took me out of the movie a bit - it seemed out of line with everything else. Like a quantum leap above all the rest of the tech we saw. I’d have to fan-wank an alien visitation for that one ;).
I just watched this the other day; I figured I’d catch it before it left the theaters. I wasn’t expecting much because it got so-so reviews. Even with low expectations, I was still disappointed. Especially coming from the creator of District 9. What a mess of a movie.
You have an elite, huge space station that rules the world. And it’s protected by a hardened ground-based missle defense system—oh, wait, no. Its defenses consist of a guy shooting a shoulder-fired rocket out of a van. But only if you text him first. And he’s the only one who can do it, so don’t even ask anyone else to try. And he has to be a war criminal, because that helps, somehow.
Even disregarding the gaping plot holes (med pods, missle shooting, rebooting the computer), the rest of the movie sucked too. Every fight scene was incoherent due to excessive shakycam, the villains were so cardboard they made Scooby-Doo script writers blush, and the movie doesn’t follow its own rules about what kills a person. Lose too much blood? You’re dead. Have your entire face blown off? Just get it 3D printed back on. Also, Jodie Foster’s accent. Also, Sharlto’s embarrassing performance.
The slums and Earth visuals were amazing looking; everything else about the movie sucked robot balls.
Edited to add:
At the end of the movie, at the supposedly happy ending, I was just as mystified as everyone else here. Great, they’re all citizens. Now what? How has this solved the problem of allocating scarce resources among too many people? Who will get to live on the space station? I’m guessing not the masses; probably the same exact people as before. But everyone gets a med pod at least. Yay, I guess? What a terrible resolution to the movie.
Did Jodie Foster have an accent? I didn’t notice… 
As well as all the plot holes that have been fairly pointed out already - what was the deal with the “killer code” attachment to the data in Bad Dude’s head? It would kill you when you used it? Wouldn’t it be a lot more logical to have one that killed a code hijacker at the point where he ripped it out of your head?
Most of the plot was pretty so-so, but I did like Spider. Oh, and Matt’s redshirt BFF (didn’t see that one coming, now did we? Just once I’d kind of like the best mate to survive)
When they do, they’re called sidekicks.
Really?! 
:rolleyes: This part didn’t bother me in the least, and the movie made it pretty damn clear what was going on:
The official Elysium position on [del]illegal aliens[/del] Earthers coming to [del]the U.S./Europe[/del] Elysium unauthorized was clearly to catch them when they landed (when warning them off [del]with a border fence and signs[/del] by radio didn’t work, as it wasn’t really expected to) and then deport them back to [del]Mexico/Morocco[/del] Earth.
The position of Foster’s Elysian Defense Secretary was that they should be blown out of the sky before getting to Elysium. However, that was against official policy; Elysian government, and probably society, shrugs if the occasional trespasser dies [del]in the desert of thirst/of drowning when their raft fails[/del] of a heart attack during pursuit, but doesn’t want to be perceived as actively trying to kill them. Thus, she had to use Sharlto’s rogue agent to do it; plausible deniability and all that.
I’m sure Elysium was supposed to have more robust defenses than some barely-controllable psycho with a shoulder-fired missile 
but Foster and her department weren’t supposed to use them against mostly-harmless trespassers. Just as the United States and Europe have formidable military forces to stop an armed invasion but don’t use them against unarmed border-crossers or refugee rafts. As others have posted, the entire movie is a lengthy (or, if you don’t like it, belabored) metaphor, and the official/unofficial treatment of Earther trespassers is squarely a part of that.
The way you just explained it makes a lot more sense than anything I saw in the movie. Maybe I missed some dialogue because I totally didn’t get at the time that the missle launch was supposed to be “off the books” so to speak. I saw the ship coming in, Jodie Foster yelling “Shoot them down!” and then the control room crew seemed to be a little shocked but not too surprised. I mean, who else would try to shoot down a plane trying to get to Elysium? That doesn’t make any sense.
But even if there were plausible deniability, no one denied anything! At the time, Kruger (sp?) was a government agent and the President knew immediately what had happened and that his Defense Minister had ordered the ships blown up. Also, didn’t Jodie Foster order the ships blown up in front of the entire control room? So the government is secretly but not secretly blowing shit up.
The post-incident meeting where the President called Foster’s character to the carpet was most of the exposition on this. And you’re right: the reaction of the control room personnel, and the fact that the President mentioned previous incidents and only fired Kruger and gave Foster’s character a final warning (rather than ordering his arrest and firing her) showed that what Foster’s character did was considered wrong but not too big a deal. :eek: Which again fits with the metaphor of the movie that [del]illegal aliens[/del] Earthers weren’t considered quite human by [del]First Worlders[/del] Elysians.
The clues before President Exposition’s 
meeting were that:
(1) even after ships were destroyed, when one made it to Elysium, the trespassers were rounded up and brought to huge ships marked DEPORTATION (or something like it), rather than killed on the spot. The Elysian government thus had some compunction or scruple about killing trespassers in full view of the Elysian public that they didn’t have in space where only government employees in the control center would know.
(2) Kruger’s Transformer-iffic crappy-van-hiding-high-tech-vehicle was marked something like Elysium Civil Cooperation Bureau, implying that his official job was to liaison with the Earth authorities to stop or capture trespassers rather than killing them outright. Sorta like a “military advisor” to a Third-World country, who ends up shooting at the enemy as much as training the ally’s troops.
I kind of liked the show.
It took some time for the bruises on my head to heal from being beaten with a baseball bat…but otherwise not too bad.
My WAG is that it takes a few hours for Elysium tech support to reboot the computers, the ambulance shuttles get recalled from Earth (though more than a few either come back with the medpods or never make it off the surface), and the fake citizens actually on Elysium get deported (except for the surviving ringleaders who are executed). Mme Delacourt is vindicated, and Elysium adopts a lot sticker security policies (including making a computer coup a lot more difficult).
I have to disagree. The Elysium Elite will be on the phone trying to get through to Elysium tech support, located no doubt in Djibouti or thereabouts. The tech workers will be busy using a med pod to enlarge their genitals, drinking, and asking whether the callers have tried turning Elysium off and on again.
Meanwhile, Spider will use his armed henchmen and mad hacking skillz to install himself as the Strongman of Elysium, which will become a slightly more ethnic dictatorship.
“Civil Cooperation Bureau” is one of Blomkamp’s South African references - it was the name of a covert hit squad of the apartheid government.