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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]6) Jodie Foster’s accent is weird[/h2]

Elysium

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Yeah, I found it weird too. Her whole performance is weird. She seems like kind of a weird person. If this was just one of many awkward things about the movie—the way it was with the bizarre dialect of After Earth, which had a host of other weird elements that got in the way of being able to simply enjoy the story and action—I’d find it an acceptable point to be made. It’s a worthwhile observation, but it’s the value judgment I find less convincing. Everyone in the Elysium world seems to have weird accents. A lot of people on Earth have weird accents too. Is this something that really requires an explanation? Foster’s character and her people have a weird Francophilia thing going on too. It shows they’re pretentious twats. I take no issue with this. I can relate to pretentious twats demonstrating Francophilia (and not just Calvin Candie).

I was far more concerned with the less than perfect dubbing of her lines. Lots of dialogue in movies are looped, redubbed for better sound, replaced in post-production, but Foster’s words were pretty frequently misaligning with her mouth. This makes me curious as to what technological fixes they were hoping to make, and what they were replacing. Maybe the accent was a late addition. I’m curious as to why, but this seems more like a minor quibble than a crack in the movie’s foundation.

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