Ok, Elysium... First let's be clear I liked it a lot - more than Pacific Rim which everyone has been raving about, and much more than the somewhat forgettable Oblivion. This isn't a film review, but as a fan of Neill Blomkamp and movies of this genre which I would call "sci-fi movies with a point" and someone who supports valiant attempts like this by studios to do something new, I think it's worth discussing briefly why Elysium didn't live up to its obvious potential...
I must say that while I was entranced by much of the stunning, epic imagery unfolding up on the screen I couldn't help thinking why don't they spend the same amount of money, effort and resources on each line of the script as they do on each amazing, gloriously designed and rendered frame of this movie? The mismatch was literally jarring in places. And most people seem to agree the main problems were due to the script, whose flaws are numerous... but there have been plenty of thorough dissections already. (Suffice to say that one of the biggest flaws is the equivalent of having your hero managing to reach Treasure Island against all odds, finding the treasure - which his life depends on - and completely ignoring it.)
It's my firmly held belief that in all cases the single most important factor that determines the quality of a film is "The script, the script, the script" as Hitchcock said. Seems kind of obvious since it is the plan for the film after all, but I've had debates before about whether a director can be the most important factor, since they can potentially turn a bad or mediocre script into something great, or vice versa, etc. To be clear, I'm not saying blame or credit the scriptwriter for every good or bad movie, I'm talking specifically about the final shooting script that forms the blueprint for the film, which can be partly created by the director, producer, etc. (In practice what generally happens is critics blame the writer when it's a bad script and credit the director when it's a good one. That can't happen in this case since Blomkamp is credited as both)
So... our expectations for Elysium were extremely high, as we imagined what would this guy who did District 9 do if he was let loose with a Hollywood blockbuster budget? By Blomkamp's own account that's exactly what Sony did, giving him a very wide berth. Well, there's a reason why movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars usually hire one or more skilled, professional screenwriters who are paid proportionally. On the other hand I'm somewhat familiar with the Hollywood development process so I'm not going to lay the blame solely on Blomkamp since we have no idea how the final shooting script came to be...
One of the weaknesses of Elysium compared to District 9 is its failure to convince us of the fully fleshed out reality of this world. @TysonWade who is a huge Blomkamp fan tweeted "Only complaint was the world felt small. District 9 felt bigger. Why?" But a different friend on Facebook said this was awesome world building, on par with Blade Runner. Very different reactions. Another colleague at work brought up the same thing, saying the world - especially Elysium itself - felt like a facade without a fully developed reality to it, which I agree with. We were never really invited in to see the wealthy society that inhabited this world. We just saw a few cartoonish figures who were meant to represent the pinnacle of this class structure. Jodie Foster's character being an oddly isolated, lone figure with no cabal of co-conspirators, there was no sinister web of corruption to take us deeper into the intrigue, etc. We never got a sense of the wider world - what are other cities like? If they can build a giant Halo ring like that, have we explored/colonized the rest of the solar system? Are there other organizations out there the downtrodden classes of Earth might turn to? Who knows...
This is a question of whether a movie is "open or closed frame". Check out this further elaboration you film students might be familiar with:
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~koepnick/noir_s02/FilmForm1.htm
Films I would consider successfully Open frame would be the first Star Wars, Close Encounters, The French Connection, Terminator, or the more recent Children of Men, most of which are descendants of cinéma vérité (Lucas had just done American Graffiti, a very raw, documentary-style film before Star Wars). Examples that feel closed frame to me would be 2001, Logan's Run, Gattaca, etc. To be clear, Elysium was MEANT to be naturalistic and open-frame, that is after all Blomkamp's trademark, and it's part of the reason were disappointed he didn't fully deliver in that department. So why did it fall short?
I would argue the script is where choices are made about what is shown, described, implied, how open ended the story is, how determinate or indeterminate things are, how many characters there are... I've noticed that back in the 60s and 70s films tried harder to achieve a sense of naturalism, and I don't mean the modern gimmicky shaky cam and 'gritty' post which has nothing to do with reality beyond the lens, it's only an artifact of technology that captures (or fakes) that reality on any given piece of hardware for that day. In the 70s for example, actors in films still used to talk over each other at the same time (See Catch-22 or almost any of Spielberg's early films). Apparently that never happens any more. There were weird, quirky twists and plot turns inspired by the unpredictable nature of real life. There used to be random people who lived outside of the central story, passing in and out of frame, some with lines, some not, all there just to flesh out the world and add texture, life and believability. Modern scriptwriting conventions teach you to strip out all extraneous elements to the bare minimum until you have a tight, lean script with no fat. But what if you cut out so much you end up with a bare, lifeless shell? Or what if your arbitrary release schedule is so tight there's no time to add in all those layers of nuance and detail before production begins...
Anyway I will just sum up with a general complaint I have about many big studio movies which spend far too much money and effort on everything including actors and not nearly enough on getting the script right (which effectively costs nothing in terms of resources and studio overheads) before greenlighting production. On the other hand we do sometimes hear when projects canceled or postponed indefinitely until the script is right, which is the right thing to do.
