Elysium is your typical stick-it-to-the-man movie. The extreme separation of wealthy and poor, healthy and dieing, clean and dirty, hell even Spanish speaking and French speaking is just over the top.
Max (Matt Damon) is a former criminal turned legit who works in a factory of some kind where he is lethally exposed to radiation and has 5 days to live. With the help of the seedy underground crime community, he is able to become bionic and sneak onto Elysium to be fixed by their healing machines. There are over the top fight scenes, extremely convenient moments and half-baked loved story.
Elysium’s main message seems to be “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” or in the case of Elysium, the people of Elysium get to live in an utopian society while the earthlings get to live in third world conditions and skimp and scrap to survive. You would think this such amazing advances in technology where almost any injury, including having your face blow up, could be fixed by a machine and mind-blowing advancements in robotics that an advanced society would have figured out how to fix the problems of earth.
As for Max, you never really care about him. He is just a guy down on his luck, trying to survive. Matt Damon doesn’t really do a great job of making you connect or feel for the character because he is the same throughout the whole movie: just survive. He never is sad, happy, anything, just this constant survive, survive, beat someone up because of my bionic suite, survive state.
Elysium also has their own problems caused by an internal power struggle between the president and defense secretary (Jodie Foster). Once you get past Jodie Fosters odd accent, you never really know why she has a bug up her butt about how the politics of Elysium are conducted. It is just this sudden desire to overthrow the president and that part of the story ends suddenly and anti-climatically.
There are just so many things wrong with this movie that they tried to save with cool special effects and a futuristic setting. This movie isn’t worth watching until it is being show on HBO or if you want to rent it from Redbox.
4 out of 11
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