Almost Perfect

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2014)

Before I initially rented this movie, I had heard that it's a waste of money. However, I sat down and watched it because I thought it sounded good regardless of what people said, and I'm glad I did. Elysium made it near to the top of my favorite movies list. Here's why you shouldn't believe the hate and at least give this movie a chance... Elysium takes place in a future where the richest people of Earth have built and evacuated to a floating habitat when the world became plagued with disease, crime, and severe overpopulation. To prove that they are far richer than anyone on Earth, the citizens of Elysium all have MedBays that can heal any and all ailments instantly, while the citizens of Earth live in a dystopia where people are lucky to survive the day. The main character, Matt Damon, is hard to like because you don't want to connect with a guy who is selfish, but you do because you think "yeah, I'd be selfish too". If there is one gripe I have about the movie, it is that Jodie Foster's character seems like she was just injected in there. The entire movie could've been written without her character even mentioned, and everything would've probably still happened the same. On the other hand, my personal favorite character, Sharlto Copley, is the one guy no one seems to like. He is not likable at all. He is a psychopath who loves to cause others pain and suffering, and he loves to kill people - in fact, that is his function in the movie - but he plays that man so well that it is terrifying. When we first meet Max (Matt Damon), it's made quite clear that he's a former criminal. Max is quickly assaulted by two police officers on the way to work for being sarcastic to them, and it sends him to the hospital, where he reunites with his childhood friend, Frey (Alice Braga), who is a nurse at this hospital. After Max is off of work, he's approached by his best friend, Julio (Diego Luna), about hijacking some cars, which Max declines. The next day, Max goes to work as usual, but gets locked in the kiln and he's exposed to a full dose of radiation that will kill him in five days. It is now that Max asks Julio to take him to see Spider (Wagner Moura) - introduced earlier in the movie as the man who sells tickets to people to be smuggled into Elysium - so he can get a ticket. Julio agrees and gets Max to Spider, but even after Julio gives him money, he does not have enough to buy a ticket, so Spider gives him a different option. Hack into the cerebral knowledge of a citizen of Elysium to access the data through them for new identities. Max agrees, but only under the condition that the man whose brain he hijacks be John Carlyle (William Fichtner), the CEO of Armadyne. As a bonus, Spider also equips Max with a exterior-skeleton to make up for the strength he's losing to radiation poisoning. During all of this, a woman named Delacorte (Jodie Foster) has been conspiring with Carlyle to write a program called Sabre to make her president of Elysium because she thinks the current president is too weak to "properly" deal with the illegals being smuggled in. Carlyle write the program and stores it in his brain to take to Elysium. However, on his way up, Max, Julio, and two others, shoot down Carlyle's shuttle and steal the information from him. The moment this occurs, Delacorte sends in Agent Kruger (Sharlto Copley), and he immediately goes about killing. This unfortunately includes Julio, who dies saving Max's life. Max is injured, but manages to avoid capture long enough to find Frey, who stitches his wound. It is now that Frey reveals that her daughter is suffering from the final stages of leukemia, and she begs him to take her daughter to Elysium to get healed. Max refuses and leaves to return to Spider to demand to know why he was being chased, and Spider explains that what is in Max's head can make everyone on Earth a citizen of Elysium, but they can't get to Elysium since Delacorte shut down the sky. So Max gives himself up to Kruger, finding out once he's on the shuttle that Kruger took Frey and her daughter hostage, and kept making very creepy passes at her. Once on Elysium, Max releases a grenade on the shuttle, blowing off Kruger's face. Max is instantly taken prisoner and sent to a lab to have the program removed from him, only to find out that it has a kill sequence once used or transferred, while Frey tries desperately to heal her daughter, but since she is not a citizen of Elysium, it can't work. Frey is then taken captive once again. Once Max escapes the lab - after the best conversation in the movie (Max) Where are they?! (Lab tech) The armory! (Max) ...Where the f-ck is that?! - he's reunited with Spider, who managed to sneak on amidst all the panic over a ship crashing into Elysium. Meanwhile, Kruger is healed and he stabs Delacorte in the neck in rage, before fitting himself with an exterior-skeleton and telling his men to do what they want with Frey. Max saves Frey from them and sends her back to the MedBay. Him and Spider the make their way to the core of Elysium to reboot it, but are stopped by Kruger until, after an epic fight, Kruger is killed at long last. Max, knowing that using the Sabre program will kill him, calls Frey to tell her how beautiful the Earth looks from where he is, before he runs the program and dies. The program reboots Elysium and makes everyone a citizen. The movie ends when shuttles of MedBays are deployed to heal the sick and wounded.