Elysium is a dystopian science-fiction thriller written and directed by Neill Blomkamp. Blomkamp comes from a generation of film-makers who are intimately familiar with PC based special-effects tools, and he very competently wrings a two hundred million dollar movie from a one hundred and fifteen million dollar budget. I hadn’t managed to catch this yet, and thought it might be good to checkout the iTunes 1080p rental.
Elysium treads similar ground to Blomkamp’s earlier District 9: an oppressed underclass is liberated by a reluctant every-man character (Matt Damon), while fighting against a ruthless henchman (Sharlto Copley), directed by the icy back-room figures running the show (Jodie Foster).
Personally I found Elysium to be an improvement on District 9; Blomkamp’s direction of action scenes was clear, and contained the grittiness of his earlier work, while adding a clear logic that some of the earlier work missed. Production design deserves particular mention: Philip Ivey‘s Syd Mead inspired designs are first rate, with sly homages to Alien and Aliens as well as some of Mead’s book work. The Elysium station itself is pure 1970s NASA airbrush design. Fantastic.
Box office wise: it’s been a mixed story, gross around 300 million dollars globally on a budget of 115 is pretty decent, but considering the names involved I would have thought the backers were hoping for more given both Damon and Fosters names.
Elysium iTunes 1080p Download Technical Quality
The 1080p iTunes rental clocks in at 3.85 GB at has an average video bit-rate of 4.5 Mbps. It features a stereo as well as 5.1 soundtrack. The image is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.40:1.
Picture quality was good throughout, despite the bit-rate being 0.5 Mbps below the iTunes average of 5 Mbps. Most of the time the bitrate jumps around between 4 and 10 Mbps with spikes up to around 12.5 Mbps. During extreme motion it’s possible to detect a slight drop in resolution, but this was never objectionable, and would be difficult to detect at normal viewing distances.
Elysium iTunes 1080p Screenshots
Matt Damon goes full Cyborg. Never go full Cyborg…
Matt Damon as Max lets rip on a droid in Elysium.
Elysium Station – all 1970s Nasa airbrush chrome and blue.
HR Droid at work.
Conclusion
5 out of 5. A fun middle-brow sci-fi romp. The rental in the iTunes store is five dollars right now, which is pretty decent. Well worth a spin. Alternatively the Blu-ray is available on Amazon.com for twenty bucks.
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