The difference between what you think you did and what you actually did.

Rating: 4/10 (14 January 2014)

Elysium is the movie District 9 would have been if it had sucked.
Imagine the Tea Party's worst stereotype of a "Hollywood liberal": a phony, sanctimonious poverty tourist who gets his picture taken trying to teach Amazon tribesmen how to do yoga. Now, imagine the movie this person would make as penance for the fact that he doesn't get what it's like to be disadvantaged, doesn't care, and does nothing to help anyone. You'd get something like Elysium.
150 years in the future, the Earth is a wasted working-class barrio, the rich have decamped to a luxurious orbital station that's essentially Beverly Hills in space. No, really. The people that funded and starred in this movie cast themselves and their own lifestyles as the villains, and it's anyone's guess if they even knew that they did it.
In this future, there are Health Care Pods that can fix any disease, but the Space Rich are hogging them all for their own facelifts; during the setup we see shiploads of illegal aliens (illegal earthlings?) trying to dodge missiles in order to get to one of the pods and heal the proverbial Little Girl - the first of a bunch, since that's how you zap the sympathy circuit for cheap.
It's not like you can't make a powerful and authentic message movie about class or immigration - take "El Norte" from 1983, or "Dirty Pretty Things," or hey, even "Gran Torino." But that takes a bit of patience and writing. In Elysium, they must have had an alarm go off on set when the camera stopped shaking for five seconds. It feels like a movie shot by people whose biggest fear was that they weren't making enough noise.
It's a shame, because it's a very nice-looking action movie. Neill Blomkamp is great at making futuristic action visually believable.
Unfortunately, all the action leaves no room for anything like dialogue or plot, both of which come across like a school project where the student copies a textbook sample with his name switched in, and flat-out doesn't get why that's wrong.
The protagonist: boy like girl, dream space station, grow up steal car, work bad job. Get radiation, must heal in Pod. Run, punch, shoot gun. This is the entirety of Matt Damon's character.
The "mini-boss": played by William Fichtner, which is enough to prove he's evil. In case it's not, he's made to say the phrase: "Is his skin going to fall off? Then get him off the sheets." The audience groans before they can ask themselves why the owner of a Bugatti space shuttle is making decisions about sick-bay sheets.
The main antagonist: played by Jodie Foster; proves she's evil by having sharp hair and blowing up immigrant ships first thing on-screen. Gets involved in absurd coup plot against the president of the evil space station, which makes her... evil-squared? The mad-dog muscle bad guy: Sharlto Copley under a dozen layers of beard. Is evil because he always talks about how much he's going to enjoy killing Matt Damon.
Almost forgot: the Little Girl that Matt Damon liked as a kid grows up and has a Little Girl of her own (that's 3 distinct Little Girls so far, if anyone's counting); she's deathly ill and needs some space health care.
The gravest of this movie's crimes is the ham-fisted condescension. You can only be so blunt and manipulative before the viewer checks out, and Elysium contains a moment like this for every one of its characters. The bed-sheet episode for the Fichtner miniboss is as good an illustration as any. We meet him in an evil-boss glass office above the factory floor; he's wearing an evil power-suit, has slicked-back evil hair, is looking at evil capitalist charts on a screen; and, just in case you still don't get which stereotype he represents, comes down personally to the medical bay to have an injured worker thrown off the bed before he messes it up with his hurt-fluids.
He doesn't have flunkie shift supervisors to handle petty cruelty for him, such as the manager who put Matt Damon's life in jeopardy in the first place? How does it make sense for a millionaire to do hands-on bed sheet management? It does if you're trying to mark a check-box and can't spare the time to do it well.
Last year, Jezebel published a compilation of horrible boss tales; one memorable story told of an Applebee's manager who made one of his workers finish a shift while she was having a miscarriage, because it was "too late anyway." We live in a world where this sort of thing happens for real, and the makers of Elysium couldn't even pull off "abusive workplace" with any authenticity? They wouldn't need to go far to find the real thing - read up on Hollywood employment practices if you want to know how to sweat people.
If you want to do a major movie on class disparity and exploitation - go for it. Do one decent scene that shows me how the system perpetuates itself. Show me how money creates a power imbalance in employment. Show me how the working classes are recruited into their own oppression. Show me how management and labor are played against each other. Show me how a climate of unspoken expectations causes low-level managers to take initiative in mistreating workers without explicit orders from above. Show me false hopes of social mobility.
You don't have to be subtle or coy - just don't be so damn lazy.