Just Bad

Rating: 2/10 (6 October 2013)

In a futuristic society, the poor live in squalor on a destroyed earth while the rich live on a beautiful space station called Elysium (hey, that's the title of the movie!). Max, a tough-as- nails but soft-at-heart felon turned worker, is exposed to radiation one day at the plant where he works and requires the treatment of a "Med-Bed" - the rich way to heal yourself and relax at the same time. So Max sets out to get healed with the help of a scruffy hacker named Spider and a childhood friend who has recently returned (from where?), but only if he can get past the nameless ruthless mercenary hired by evil bad Secretary of Defense Jodie Foster.
The one percent living on their own planet, and the poor banding together to exact revenge? Coming off the heels of Occupy Wall Street, this is just the movie the nation needs to heal itself and unite against the rich bad guys. But before the revolution begins, there are some questions we need to ask. How many rich people live on Elysium? The least someone can make annually to be part of the one percent is 300 grand. Lets round that up to 500 for the future...heck, let's round it up to a million. Say you have a couple hundred guys making a million, is that enough to build a giant spaceship capable of sustaining life for a hundred families? More so, how do you keep up with the costs up there? Surely it costs some hefty dough to keep those coal fires burning. Where does the money come from?
Jodie hates the bureaucracy of Elysium and aspires to be President, so she hires a sleazy businessman (William Fichtner) to rewrite the space ships code to install her as President. I'm sorry, what? By that logic, anyone could scrawl their name on the US Constitution and claim it to be divine proof they need to be President. Was she planning on all the bureaucrats of Elysium to just blindly accept her? Fichtner is so successful at rewriting this code (it's never explained in any future detail) that he installs it into his brain, only to - you guessed it! - get hijacked by a bionic Matt Damon, who steals said code. I know the movie hates rich people, but come on. Implanting stuff into your brain to safeguard information when someone can easily steal said information?
Max gets radiation poisoning. How? He works at "the plant". What does the plant create that radiates...radiation? It's never explained. He is told he has five days to live after he is infected. This plot line mysteriously disappears after he is turned bionic - did I forget to mention that? - by Spider. Does turning half your body into the Energizer Bunny save you from radiation poisoning?
Damon understandably jumped at the chance to make the evil rich look bad. Never mind the fact that a large part of this movie's $116,000,000 budget went to his bank account. But he gives up not even halfway through this movie. You can see it in his face, that slow realization an actor has that he is in a turkey of a movie. Apparently he was the director's second choice. His first? Rapper Eminem. Maybe it's understandable why he is so demoralized. But the worst part of the film is Jodie Foster. It's as if the audio designer forgot to record whenever she spoke, and decided the best fix would be to use a dubbed voice that sounded as far away from Foster as possible. She starts with a British accent, which turns somewhat French, and ends somewhere in Eastern Asia.
Some movies have a character or two that are unnecessary but there for an audience draw. They aren't needed to make the plot line progress. Here, it's as if every character matches that description. The only bright spot is Sharlto Copley, who seems to be the only one who cares about what's going on.
This isn't just a lousy movie. It's downright bad. This isn't even worth the price of a Redbox rental. Maybe if Elysium finds its way on to HBO, and you're tired of looking out the window, or you've run out of sleep aids, it'll be worth the drawn out hour and a half.