One of the worst movies I've seen in a while

Rating: 2/10 (19 September 2013)

Massive spoilers ahead! The main concept of Elysium is a dystopian future (a mere century from now, actually) where Earth has turned into an overpopulated, poor and diseased slum and a small group of super-rich people have managed to build a better life for themselves on a space station orbiting the planet, called Elysium. This space station, which looks suspiciously like a cross between the one from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the Citadel from the "Mass Effect" games, comes complete with artificial gravity and air, gorgeous houses, beautiful gardens and lots of pretty women in bikinis. Perhaps if the film had spent more time on Elysium, it would at least have been more agreeable to look at. Instead, three quarters of it take place on Earth, more specifically the postapocalyptic garbage heap that is L.A., where hero Matt Damon is trying to make up for his previous life of crime by being a factory worker. Of course he also has a love interest and tries to prove to her that he is now a decent guy. In order to make us care more about the love interest, the movie gives her a cute, terminally ill daughter. Heavy-handed storytelling is an understatement, but I have to admit that the woman who plays the love-interest-nurse does an admirable job and at least made me care more about her and her daughter than about anyone else in the story, including the actual protagonist.
The concept of "Elysium" is not a bad one. Sure, dystopian futures are hardly original, but the main idea here is interesting. I was hoping that the film would tell us a bit more about this terrible future: its politics, what people are like on Elysium, how it got this far. It does none of these things. Instead it focuses entirely on profanity-spewing, muscular tough guys with tattoos who shoot each other all day long and talk in gravelly voices, emphasising words like "fuck" and "kill" a lot. The only people from Elysium given any time to do anything are Jodie Foster's one-dimensional arch-villain and her accomplice, some ridiculously caricature of a snob who dies in the middle of the movie. Foster's character gives the impression that she's sick of her job as protector of Elysium, and not in an "I'm starting to have moral qualms about this whole thing" kind of way, but just in a "how many innocent civilians can you blow up before it just gets boring" kind of way. So she sends out yet another caricature to do the dirty work: this time it's an alcohol-swilling, bazooka-wielding, South-African lowlife with a heavy accent.
Anyway, Matt Damon has an accident in the factory which will cause him to die in five days. This sets him on a quest to get to Elysium ASAP because they have technology there that can cure anyone in literally a few seconds... Of anything. Whether it's cancer or broken bones, all you need to do is lie down in a glass cabinet and -poof- you're healed. It's like walking over a heart in an old video game. Now I'm not even saying that every sci-fi film should be scientifically sound but if you're actually trying to comment on where we're headed as a society, and you're trying to present a bleak vision of a possible future, you should at least make some effort to be in the slightest bit credible. This wouldn't happen in Harry Potter. And it's not like the writer-director is ashamed of his painfully cheap solution to the world's health problems. In fact, he seems to be in love with it. In one of the most ridiculous scenes I have seen since "The Room", the South-African thug's entire face is blown off (shown in gory detail), so they put him in one of those medical thingamajigs and guess what? His face grows right back! Tadaa! This is not the only magical technology in the film (there is also the uploading and downloading of data straight from one man's brain into another) but this is so stupid, I thought I had fallen asleep and started having an absurd dream. But I checked with my girlfriend who was also there and unless she had the same dream, this is actually in the movie. Anyway, after long, long stretches of gritty action scenes set in ugly, graffiti-infested locales, the movie wraps up with Matt Damon sacrificing his life (*yawn*) and changing the whole system of Elysium so that now, the same medical technology that makes the inhabitants of Elysium so ridiculously immortal is given to everyone on Earth. Aww... And they lived happily ever after, the en-- wait a minute? Wasn't the big problem on Earth the massive overpopulation? And now they're going to make everyone immortal? And suddenly everything's solved? Apparently so, because the music signifies we have to be happy now and end credits have made their way to the screen already. What makes me so angry with this movie – besides the horribly clumsy action scenes where I can't see what's going on and I just get seasick – is that everything about it seems to shout that this is a serious, mature sci-fi thriller about pressing social and political issues (because it's GRITTY and THEMATIC, you know) but it has absolutely nothing intelligent to say. So you want to talk about the massive gap between the haves and the have-nots? At least show us something from both sides instead of just one-dimensionally vilifying all the rich and powerful. You say overpopulation is a problem? Then don't pretend you're solving anything by bringing physical immortality to the poverty-stricken, crime-infested masses. If this were just a simple dumb action movie, I would have still been bored, but I'd have shrugged and moved on, but the filmmakers want to make you feel they have made a statement about the world. This is not it. This is an insult.