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7 Weakass Criticisms Of Elysium

A good number of people are terribly disappointed by Elysium. I feel for them, I really do. It sucks when a movie doesn’t live up to your expectations. I’m less sympathetic to weak attempts at arguments as to why a movie didn’t work for a given group of viewers, and tend to think that with the subjective nature of watching, it easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because a lot of people are making the same criticisms of a movie, then those criticisms surely must be pretty much objectively true and designate the movie as a bad one. I don’t buy it. Sometimes the standards people set for a movie are kind of bullshitty, and I think this is happening with Elysium right now.

[h2]5) The action is poorly done[/h2]

Elysium

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Wouldn’t you know it, a lot of people didn’t like the so-called “shakycam” employed by Elysium. And the cutting was too fast. And I’m sure there are plenty of other meaningless things people say in place of just “I was bored.” It’s totally acceptable to be bored in a movie. I still maintain that identifying the source of that boredom is crucial, and is often misidentified as springing from the actual substance of the movie.

But anyway. This is one grievance that makes little sense to me. For one thing, the action in this movie does not seem like the movie’s primary focus the way it is for a lot of other sci-fi movies. There didn’t even seem to be that many action sequences necessarily, but small intense moments of fighting every now and then, and a general feeling of unease and menace that violence could break out at any moment. That’s not the same as action. The Copley villain character in particular does a lot of sinister stuff but doesn’t actually spend of a lot of time fighting. It’s more of a slow burn type of action that builds towards a climax. When there is a lot of rapid movement and fighting, I found the camerawork to be clearer than most action movies, with longer shots that were taken at really high speeds with fast motion, maintaining a sense of frantic chaos without relying on cutting quite so quickly. Maybe my impression of it was anomalous, but even so, the main thrust of the film seems less reliant on action than on tension and suspense and drama.

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