Old Story, New Plot Holes

Rating: 1/10 (28 January 2014)

The only creative aspect of this film is its plot holes. I can ignore some implausibility with science fiction, but this one went too far. It didn't help that I've seen far too many futuristic elitist dystopias in the past several years and that even the best actors in this film seemed to be struggling through to their paychecks. Like Hunger Games and Upside Down, it featured a future society in which the poor are sacrificed or exploited to benefit a small group of elites, but the satellite where all the privileged live, on not too close inspection, doesn't seem even large enough to contain much more than the control centers and political offices that show in the film. It also features a scrappy hero who's been in trouble but now just wants to get by, but it's hard to sympathize with his purely self-centered reasons for fighting the system; he only wants to cure himself of radiation poisoning. He does sacrifice himself at the end, so there is a type of redemption, but it really doesn't make sense that the solution to looming oppression is to program the computers to stop being bigots, at which point, the elite all have to be nice because they only do what the computers tell them to do. I guess the writer(s) didn't study what happened to African Americans in the US after the emancipation proclamation: it was not all peaches and cream just because the white establishment called them citizens. Some of the film looked great, but I was too busy, rolling my eyes at every single movement of the plot, to notice it. District 9 was an interesting and innovative film. Elysium is, in every way that matters, exactly the opposite.