Overview

Stripped to its essence Elysium is a movie about an evil General who uses the mysterious destruction of a space cruiser as a reason to lead a massive attack on Earth. Of course retaliation for this attack is not his main motivation but that of gaining control of an ancient artifact that was uncovered in the Antarctic – Armageddon.

Review

The opening sequence of Elysium in the Antarctic succeeded in getting me interested in this movie but unfortunately it didn’t keep interested for very long.

Unfortunately, this movie just jumps from scene to scene pushing you forward without really explaining anything. An example of this is that Van, the main character, goes from being a pizza boy / Pinball racer to then becoming a member of a commando fighting force and then one of the four knights that are meant to protect Earth’s last defense. A device called Triod. Now none of this would be a problem if any of it was explained during the movie. As I write this I am baffled that the people behind this movie didn’t see any of this.

As far as the animation goes all I can muster is an ‘OK’. The best parts of the movie are the Mech fights. If you have a thing for Mechs this is definitely a movie you should watch. You can see a lot of care was taken in getting these fight scenes just right. Actually, it would have been nice to see one of the main character get into one of the Mech’s so that you can get a sense of how they can execute such complicated fighting moves. This was just another thing that this movie was missing. They did manage to animate all of the character faces to show the appropriate facial expression but all of the bodies look like toy dolls. Glossy toy dolls at that.

Also, is it too much to ask for the translators of this movie to proof the spelling of the subtitles? There is nothing more annoying than having to read through typos.

I hoped I could recommend this movie for something other than the Mech fights but I can’t find anything else. After seeing this movie I have more respect for another Korean movie that I reviewed, Wonderful Days. At least that movie tried to tell a coherent story.

Review by Noel Ruiz
www.everythingevangelion.com

Additional review

Yeah, I have to say I agree with a lot of what Noel said. Elysium looks like a cross between the TV show Reboot, Starship Troopers the animated series and the Bionicle movies, looks like it's all done in Maya.

Although, I must say the intro is really strange and curious and makes you anxious to see what else is goin down but that's just it, all going down hill. The editing is a little choppy and the story kind of jumps around. One second he's delivering pizza's and the next killing aliens. This show also has this same corny bike riding scene that was in Natural City. Holy smokes there's tons of dead time too.

There's a big but though. Nice fighting scenes between huge robots, just like in Evangelion but in CGI. Instead of calling them Eva's they're called 'Knights' and they're built with Mechatronics and they have mystical abilities (Yowza!!).

Ok, worth a viewing if you like robot fights otherwise, skip.

Review by David Marini
www.everythingevangelion.com