"Good Will Hunting" meets "Johnny Mnemonic" meets "Sicko"

Rating: 5/10 (11 August 2013)

Alternate title... "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Wait for Matt Damon to Send Down the Obamacare-Bots from Space".
In "Elysium", Neill Blomkamp unleashes a bold, shocking vision of a world, 150 years in the future, where most of Los Angeles speaks Spanish, the world's snootiest people speak French, and alarm clocks jolt the working class awake with annoying, poorly synthesized voices...
Actually, the most shocking thing in this movie is that the future still contains GMC pickups (presumably after 14 more government bailouts).
OK, so M. Night Shyamalan's directorial gimmick was the surprise ending, featuring clues brought to you by the color red, in a movie where almost nothing else happens. Apparently Mr. Blomkamp's signature style consists of thinly veiled social commentary pummeled into your (sub)conscious mind by lots of really bad-ass explosions. But even M. Night didn't squander the goodwill generated by a strong feature film debut this quickly.
But since enough has already been written - or surely will be - about Elysium's not-so-hidden agenda, I'll just focus on what a truly derivative, grade-C science fiction movie it is.
But first a question. Why did the native South Africans in Johannesburg have subtitles for their English in "District 9" but Sharlto Copley didn't have subtitles for his English in "Elysium"?!? The guy was totally indecipherable. Don't make me say the R-word! OK, I'll say it: Ripoff! Yeah, that's right, Bane was first to make it cool to be a mushmouthed uber-villain, and he did it better. At least I could tell that Bane had something interesting to say, even if I still don't know to this day what it was.
Here are some random musings about "Elysium":

I enjoyed the melodramatic overacting by the hacker king, though he could have used subtitles also. It was fun to see him determine that Matt Damon's head contained the secrets to rigging the presidency, not to mention unleashing universal health care, just by looking at a hexadecimal code dump for all of 5 seconds. I totally didn't expect that.

I felt bad for Matt Damon's character (I forgot his name already, as I will the rest of the movie in a few more hours) when he got exposed to an accidental overdose of gamma radiation. But at least he didn't walk around pantsless the rest of the movie like Dr. Manhattan in "Watchmen" (just shirtless).

Did they ever explain why the robots were exposed to lethal doses of radiation during manufacturing? It certainly didn't make them any better as marksmen. They couldn't even keep William Fichtner's sweet Bugatti from getting jacked.

I laughed at the scene where Matt got turned into a cyborg. It was straight out of MTV's new reality show, "Pimp My Exoskeleton". With street-smart docs like that, who needs the magic MRIs on Elysium?

Oh, I remember Matt's character's name now: it's Max. They only screamed it about two hundred times in one hour and forty minutes. Sorry, that's a gross exaggeration, just like everything else in this movie.

Why would the ultra-elite of the future want to confine themselves to an orbiting space station that has less square footage than Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, Steve Jobs' iYacht, and Mitt Romney's car-rooftop dog carrier combined? Don't they know that one out of every three "undocumented" shuttles gets past Elysium's land-based defense grid, which consists primarily of a mentally unstable epic beard man with a van full of space-Stingers? Then again, that success rate does make Elysium more secure than the U.S. border.

Yes, the robot and rocket-ship effects look very realistic, but the flying vehicles are kind of boring to look at, like the shuttles in "Star Trek". If the director wanted to do futuristic military aircraft right, he should have gone back 27 years and looked at the drop ship in Jim Cameron's "Aliens". That thing really looked like a futuristic Apache/Harrier hybrid, not just some boxcar with thrusters bolted on the corners.

Wait, so one minute you can have your head totally reconstructed, beard and all, after taking a grenade to the face, but the next minute you can't be cured from having your brainwaves downloaded to a USB thumb drive? I guess the data in Matt Damon's head was considered a pre-existing condition.

In the end, I think Elysium fails just because it is so clichéd, unoriginal, and inconsistent with its own vision, not because of its blatant socio-political message. It's also a huge letdown after "District 9".
By the way, I have nothing against speaking Spanish - lots of my favorite people do it, and most of them speak my language better than I speak theirs (Shakira, por ejemplo). I wish I had more time to study Spanish but I'm too busy writing this review. In fact, the only level on which Elysium succeeds is as a nice introduction to the Spanish language, which is why I'm giving it two extra stars. At around $10 a ticket, it's a lot cheaper than Rosetta Stone.