Basically an action movie

Rating: 6/10 (29 August 2013)

I didn't have big expectations from this movie when I went to see it. First of all I don't understand so much hype about movie directors last movie District 9. In my opinion, it was a simple and illogical action movie. But this is now, we have new movie with plot holes. The plot for this movie is simple enough and reminds of a cyberpunk movie Johhny Mnemonic" with Keanu Reaves. We have some classical dystopian setting which could have been explained better. Basically, Earth is overpopulated and it appears that national governments have failed, but we don't know how or why. All the rich people live on a clean space station/habitat called Elysium orbiting Earth and of course sometimes the poor try to reach this promised country with some illegal shuttles, which reminds of the boat-people who try to reach today's Europe from Africa or USA from Cuba. These shuttles are being routinely shot down from Earth by Elysium assassins. The protagonist of the movie is Matt Damon (as Max de Costa) who is lucky to have a job in a economically struggling robot factory in L.A. These robots are very sophisticated and put to use as police and soldiers and it is not clear why is necessary to have human workers assemble these robots. The owner of the factory complains about dropping productivity and he never tried full production-automatisation. But that is just the beginning. Matts character gets irradiated in the factory (it is never explained why the robots he assembles need a radiation treatment) and he will die in 5 days unless he is treated in some medical bay on Elysium which can cure every disease. As an act of a desperate man he agrees to kidnap factory owner (who is a citizen of Elysium)and steal access codes for his accounts and everything else from his cerebral implants. For this he is equipped with some cyber-exoskeleton and then the movie forgets that he is irradiated and that anybody who touches him will get some radiation from him. The heist goes awry and he is hunted by some south-African mercenaries who work as agents/hit squad for Elysium (it is never explained how is this possible in L.A. – USA). Max does not know that the information he downloaded in the heist which he keeps in his head is an access code for the entire Elysium. Then there is Jodie Fosters character who wants this code for herself so she can rule on the space station. We then have Max's childhood friend Frey and her ill daughter who are accidentally in the middle of the struggle. There was a possibility for some love story strand of the plot but it was probably dropped and instead we have some shooting and killing and shaky camera movement, typical for a modern action movie. And there are some other plot holes. For example, we see in the movie that Elysium is capable to create no-fly zones wherever they want, if so why they allow those illegal shuttles to reach them? Later in the movie we see that some shuttles can come through the defenses of the station without problems. At the beginning of the movie we see a mercenary use a shoulder launched missile on Earth to shoot down a shuttle in space which is thousands of Kilometers away which is very unrealistic, modern technology or not. At some point Jodie Fosters character is wounded and she didn't want Frey who is a doctor to help her, who knows why. Anyway we have some predictable ending of the movie and the humanity lived happily ever after. Redeeming point of the movie is that it never gets really boring. And it is not too long.