Will be lauded by some and Egregious to others

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2013)

After finishing this movie I felt relieved in a couple of ways: One I didn't waste time at the theater or lay down hard earned cash for the Blu-ray. The fact that I only spent a buck sixty at Red Box left me with a better feeling than the end of this film. The special effects and cinematography were excellent but the story stank it up, all the way to Elysium and the characters were laughingly stereotypical or stoically inhuman.
Loosely, the plot is a caricature of America today but set in a futuristic world where the greedy rich and evil corporations grind the life out of the lowly every-man portrayed by Matt Damon. In this futuristic world the rich have deserted the planet for a Florida sized space station called Elysium and left all their troubles far behind. The victims of this film (which I'm guessing are the poor) are stuck on the burnt-out planet with no way to leave.
Looking quite fit, Jodie Foster personified the uncaring rich bitch with control of government anti-immigration efforts. A lack of depth in her character lingers throughout the film as we never know much about her, other than she has knockout legs and is mean as a snake.
William Fichtner plays the ruthless businessman John Carlyle, which was symbolically a dead ringer for the mythical American corporation that makes tons of money yet never pays taxes. Here again we're at a loss to explain this calculating and laconic character as he has maybe three lines in the film before his ultimate demise.
Added perhaps for a little comic relief was the talented Faran Tahir that played the president Patel of Elysium. He's undoubtedly from India and notably pacifistic in comparison to Foster. This left me wondering if Patel is an archetypal symbol of how the writers delight in seeing our own government leaders.
Ah, the writers. After finishing the film, I would have bet a droid to a doughnut that the screen writers of were indeed a bunch of freshmen English majors working on their first part-time job. After a little reflection upon the morning after, I came upon two conclusions: One, the screenplay is a little deeper than I first thought or two, the screenplay was indeed so bad that the incompetency added a new and much deeper dimension.
On the other side of this equation is the poor downtrodden. Once again, the writers fail to provide a back-story to explain why the greedy rich moved to a space station and why the poor can't seem to turn things around. The poor have inherited the earth but can't do anything with it. They can't look inward to themselves but instead turn scheming eyes to big-brother Elysium. The answer to all this seems to be medical equipment. Yep, strange as it seems, the evil corporation who doesn't mind wasting a few lives, will not waste dollars on elaborate and powerful medical equipment needed to save the life of protagonist Matt Damon (can't remember his character). Matt who was a victim of a careless supervisor (aren't we all?) unwittingly goes into a high-radiation area to avoid delays in production. This would anger Mister evil corporation who is always watching pie and bar charts to monitor plant productivity.
The most technically gifted of the poor downtrodden are pretty much devoted to a life of crime. And the crime is sending illegals to Elysium with false DNA IDs aboard fast moving shuttle craft. Finally the criminally downtrodden manage to steal the brain contents of Mister evil corporation and download the knowledge into Matt Damon's noggin. None of these guys have a job so they're excellent hackers. Because of radiation exposure, Matt has five days to live and desperately seeks a way to get to the medical equipment on Elysium or perish. Now this is where the movie gets comical. The list of people that need the medical equipment on Earth keep getting bigger and bigger. To bring this boring mess to an end, the criminally inclined hackers manage to download the data from Matt Damon. This turns out to be a sacrifice and poor Matt becomes another victim. The upside to this mess occurs when the hackers pull an ingenious switch and make all the poor downtrodden of Earth into citizens of Elysium.
The last scene in the film has the Elysium shuttle craft (much nicer than earth shuttle craft) picking up it's new citizens for a ride to the Elysium medical facilities. Hope they didn't have to go through a website to arrange this.
I generally avoid scathing reviews, but when people spend this much money in the film industry to make a heavy social or political comment, I have to take notice. But it's completely up to the viewer whether this film merits credit, or whether it's a two hour waste of time built with twisted logic and trendy misinformation.