Date Night 2013 #3

Three date nights in one summer. Our romance meter reads "Inferno!"

Continuing our short March of the Summer Sci-Fi blockbusters, Elysium. We were very excited to see this. Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, is a lot of violence and slow motion montages and sad faces and dark clothes and extremely simple solutions to extremely thorny human problems. It's like a goth Armageddon. With maybe a dash of Robo-Cop. Everyone who knows me knows I love me some Sci-Fi. Not enough to eventually put money in Orson-Scott Card's sleazy, paranoid, disappointing, closeted little pockets--I'll wait til that one comes on cable--but enough to go and see this and this and write glowing reviews for both. How does that list not include Pacific Rim you ask? The phrases, "my wife hates me" and "almost divorced" play into the answer.

Elysium. I was so excited to see Jodi Foster as the head bad guy. When she first appeared on screen, I leaned into my wife and whispered, "She is gonna be good." And she was, for the 13 seconds she appeared in screen. Blomkampt gave her almost nothing to do. I was really looking forward to a riff on the apoplectic, forehead vein throbbing, near aneurism, performance she gave in Carnage.... but she would have had to have things to act for that to happen.

Same with Damon. You could have dropped Vin Diesel into that part and no one would've known the difference. And, in a Los Angeles where everyone, including Damon's character, was of Latin decent, Diesel's racial ambiguity would've served the part better.

They had machines that could heal the final stages of leukemia in less than thirty seconds, and reconstruct faces blown off by grenades (did I mention crazy violent? ). Why couldn't the same machines heal the psychotic pathology of the the person who turned out to be the main bad guy or even some of the rampant narcissism of the citizens of Elysium? And why, on a planet whose main problem is over-population, would mass access to miracle healing machines be seen as a the answer? It's not, really, you know? And I'm not saying, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," I'm just saying, try to put a little thought into the script, man.

In closing, I give it 2 sheared off faces via explosion out of a 4 sheared off faces via explosion rating system.