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Elysium
"Unless you like giant Mech armor
movies, pass on this one."
-
Equinox21
Elysium (2002)
Director:
Gweon Jae-Wung
Writer: Park Jeong-Hun
Producer:
Kim Seok-Gi , Oh Won-Cheol
Cast: Kim Jang, Kim Jeong-A, Lee
Jae-Myeong, Sa Seong-Wung, Ahn Jong-Ik, Yu Dong-Gyun, Lee Jong-Gu, Kang Gu-Han,
Jeong Ok-Ju, Im Eun-Jeong, Lee Ho-In, Lee Gyu-Seok
Running
Time: 75 min.
Plot:
ELYSIUM - The name of planet which invade the
earth. A scientist newly found a planet at AD 2113 which is located at the end
of the Galaxy and they give it a name to Elysium. The story is about the message
that only love for humanity can save the earth and the human beings in
aggressive and resistant historical situation with the motive of brave worrier's
adventures saving the human from attacks of outer world.
Reviews
EQUINOX21'S REVIEW:
Wonderful Days was the first Korean animation I’ve
seen, and Elysium was the first 100% CGI Korean animation that I’ve seen. But,
it really doesn’t hold a candle to Wonderful Days or any of the full CGI movies
to come out in the US.
The plot is pretty basic…
Evil Alien General Necros assassinates the leader (and peace delegation) of his
own race, the Elysium, and blames it on the Humans. He uses this as
justification to invade Earth. Van is a pizza delivery boy who survives the
initial invasion, and eventually finds himself piloting an enormous Mech armor
suit (which looks an awful lot like Slave Zero from the video game of the same
name). He is one of four pilots of the human versions of the Mechs, but the
Elysium have countless of their own. Who do you think wins? It doesn’t take a
rocket scientist to figure it out.
Now, about the animation,
here’s a run down of the good, the bad and the ugly:
Good
- Characters’ skin – looked
very realistically textured, well done on that
- Space and Mech battles –
pretty fluid looking and quite impressive
- Music – a couple decent
songs… the rest was ok
- Lighting effects – VERY
well done. Great shadows, and reflections in the correct places; this added a
LOT to the animation
- Rain effects – for the 30
seconds it appeared on screen, it was pretty cool
- Faces – pretty well
animated, for the most part (except lips, see below)
- Water effects – looked
VERY real
- Shattering of General
Necros – General Necros gets attacked and shatters at one point (then reforms
himself). It was pretty cool… kinda like shattering glass
- Metal look – looked very
much like brushed metal, instead of the cliché shiny-as-hell-metal
- Tentacles – Necros’
tentacles were well animated
- Explosions – looked like
real explosions… they might very well have been and just stuck in the CGI, I’m
not sure
Bad
- Hair effects – lousy;
looked like it was just “hair textures” stuck on the characters’ head models
- Whole movie was like a
“last time on…” segment – at the beginning of Part 2 of a 2-part episode of
ANY TV show, they always start off with a “last time on (whatever show you’re
watching)”, where they show a quick summary of what happened on the last
episode; this whole movies felt that way. There were no segues from one scene
to the next… it simply JUMPED to the next scene. It was very distracting.
- The Pinball “Pod Race”
scene – felt like it was right out of Episode 1, and not done well AT ALL,
terribly choppy animation during that scene
- Lips not animated
synchronous to voices – the lip movement was negligible at best, you could
barely tell a character was talking (instead you’d think the voice was coming
from a character off screen), because the lips were hardly animated at all.
Crappy job.
- Body/Hand movement –
Perhaps this is just one of my “CGI Animation pet peeves”, but I HATE how many
companies animate bodies and hands and don’t use motion capture. In Elysium,
the characters (when NOT in Mech armor) moved in a very “animated” way.
Example: When a character is swinging his arm, and it abruptly stops by his
side (a bit like a “snap to” feature)… it’s not realistic, no one really moves
like that. This was annoying.
- “Plasticy” textures on
dress (but good fabric movement) – Van’s girlfriend, Lydia, wears a dress at
one point that looks like it’s made out of plastic (the way it shines and
such), however it moves like silk. The look was bad, the movement was good.
- Clipping – When Lydia is
lying in the grass, you can see blades of grass moving through her hair that’s
resting on top of it. There were a few other things like this that should
have been fixed
- Flickers – Not sure what
caused this, but there were at least a dozen incidents where a shadow or
another element on someone’s body would flicker. There was no excuse for this
not being fixed
- 75 minutes long – had they
added more segues in to connect the scenes it could have been longer than only
75 minutes and really helped it not flow so damn fast. Within 10 minutes of
the move starting the Humans were already at war
Anyway, that’s more or less
all of it. Not bad, but not NEARLY as good as most of the full CGI movies I’ve
seen. Unless you like giant Mech armor movies, pass on this one.
EQUINOX21'S RATING:
6.5/10
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