Maleficent (2014)

3/5

Disney's Maleficent stars Angelina Jolie as the titular character, and her casting is the best decision the filmmakers' could have made. She gives a spectacularly complex performance as the kind-hearted Maleficent, a fairy who places a curse on Sleeping Beauty as revenge for being stripped of her wings and the power of flight. She brings depth and gravitas that has felt absent in most Disney characters and she alone is the reason to see this movie.

Although the story is full of surprising twists, it is laid out and presented with such unoriginal style as to make it feel old and overused. We start with a voice-over explaining that there are two worlds: the world of fairies and the world of humans. We are introduced to Maleficent's childhood and the magical world she inhabits. She swirls and swoops in extravagant 3D as if to show off the prowess of Disney's CGI programmers. Then she meets a human, falls in love, and gets her heart broken. And on and on it goes in such an unsurprising and familiar progression as to make the whole movie feel like something we've seen a hundred times before, except this time they've recycled familiar names and placed them on opposite sides of the moral compass from the first time they were in a Disney movie.

Now, to be fair, I am far from an expert on Disney and far from an expert on Maleficent. I haven't seen Sleeping Beauty and I've barely seen Maleficent (I was extremely tired and found myself nodding off several times during the movie)! So I suppose it is a little unfair that I am reviewing this movie. But looking at this movie from a purely cinematic perspective, I see a lot of missed potential. Although the art direction and costuming are fantastic, Maleficent feels like even more of a money-making operation than most of Disney's products. They are cashing in on the Wicked train by turning a bad guy into a misunderstood good guy and passing the bad guy buck onto some other poor schmuck. Whereas Wicked felt fresh, original, and textured, Maleficent just feels like a copycat. I wanted this movie to be as phenomenal as Wicked was, but I didn't get that. A good movie that disappoints you is worse than a mediocre movie that meets all your expectations.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587310/

Elysium (2013)

4/5

Neill Blomkamp's Elysium will, of course, draw comparisons to the director's previous work, District 9, since both are sci-fi action movies employing hyper-realistic special effects, cinema verité-style camerawork, and plots that play like morality tales about the maltreatment and subjugation of a population's citizens. While the combination of all those things felt exhilarating and unprecedented 5 years ago, here they feel a bit tired.

Elysium, like District 9 and Children of Men, delivers a precisely-detailed and complexly-envisioned future. But the characters with which it inhabits that world are unexciting; their quest is uncompelling; the stakes are underwhelming. It is not enough for the background to be thematically interesting, because the foreground is what will get our blood pumping and bring us to our feet cheering. Instead the story feels like a pretty barebones excuse for fights and explosions. Luckily, the (rather sparse) action is exceptional, leaps and bounds better than most of what we are seeing in theaters today. Some scenes are so visually arresting, so stunningly beautiful, that they seem somehow operatic and timeless. That they are simultaneously violently graphic and viscerally horrifying does not diminish their value, but simply brands them in our minds.

Elysium is ultimately not as good as District 9. While perhaps more technically impressive than his previous work, it needed a stronger story to unlock all the potential it had. What frustrates me is that we know Blomkamp can do better. And I sincerely hope he pulls through on the next one, because I love watching his movies.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1535108/

District 9 (2009)

5/5

Neill Blomkamp's District 9 is a rare treasure of cinema. Much like my favorite film of 2006, Children of Men, the director envisions an alternate yet wholly believable future, and then uses his camera to immerse us in the gritty, raw realism of his dystopia. The story is set in Johannesburg, where an alien spacecraft stops and hovers over the city. The military drills into the ship to reveal a population of malnourished prawn-like aliens. Humanitarian organizations demand they be taken care of, and a district is set aside for them to co-exist with humans. Crime and violence precipitates between humans and aliens for over 20 years until it is decided that the aliens should be relocated to a new area. It is here that the movie begins, after setting in place all the essential details that will be brought back, full circle, to the thrilling climax and poignant denouement.

Wikus van de Merwe is the bureaucratic agent responsible for evicting the prawns. One such prawn, Christopher Johnson, and his son are the other main characters of the story. All three are painted with such clarity and precision, and acted with such honesty, that they must be real. Shot with a vivid cinéma vérité style, you truly feel and live in their world. The editing and overall pacing are both brilliant, effortlessly mixing together CGI animation, documentary-like footage, and intense action sequences. The film does a remarkable thing, and it does so with absolute perfection. As I said in the beginning of my review, this film is a rare treasure of cinema and one I will not forget for a very long time. Go and see this movie. Go and see this movie now.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/