Verdict: ☆☆ – – –

This was an interesting political movie. Written and directed by District 9’s Neil Blomkamp, it was fairly simple in it’s plot because we’ve all seen this before… not in a movie, per se, but on the news! But what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in CGI.

The 1% The rich and powerful people on Earth decided they’d had enough of the world (they helped create) that has gone to Hell and, because they’re rich and powerful, built a space station (named Elysium) to live on with all their riches and power and just left all the poor people behind on Earth to suffer without any technology or privileges. Apparently by 2051, the rich and poor have grown so far apart, they’re completely alien to one another.

The healthcare on Earth is archaic for the 99% everyone who can’t afford to even eat properly and were forced to buy Obamacare have to live with very few hospitals and dismal medical coverage. Everyone on Earth is sick and everyone on the space station has their own healing chambers that fix everything from a cold to Leukemia and even old age in a matter of seconds. Occasionally human traffickers transport those who can afford a ticket up to Elysium but only a tiny fraction of those get up there because the “alien” ships are usually blown out of the sky by Elysium defenses. You know, because the rich don’t want to just build a few thousand more of these medical pods that will cure everyone on Earth. That would be an expense they are not willing to shell out.

Enter a dude named Max (Matt Damon) who gets sick from an industrial accident at his crappy job. Luckily he knows a computer whiz/human trafficker known as Spider, who can get him to the space station for healing, but only if he is allowed to turn Max into a human cyborg that can download data from the person who “built” the space station and therefore can hack into the system, change some code, reboot it (because Elysium is one big operating system run by Unix) and make everyone on Earth a citizen of the space station, thereby helping give medical attention to everyone for free. Think Obamacare becoming real Universal Healthcare with the click of a mouse and a reboot of a Windows machine.

A subplot in this story about the political turmoil on the space station reminds me of American politics at its finest from the perspective of an American joe schmoe. Everyone in office has no soul and is trying to unseat the politician above and there are agents in the field who also have no souls doing the dirty work. And no one is listening to the 99% majority of the people.

I don’t want to give too much more away, because I’d spoil the whole flick for everyone, but if you’ve been watching the news anytime in the past 20 years, you’ve seen this movie. It’s like Blomkamp watched the 6:00 news and said, “Hey, that sounds like a good plot!” In a recent interview, he did admit to this in a way by saying, “”This isn’t science fiction. This is today.” I found it interesting that Elysium police are called “Homeland Security” and that the Secretary of Defense on Elysium (Played oddly by Jodie Foster) has her own private assassins running around doing lethal, top secret covert ops and basically tells the President at least twice to take a hike in no certain terms.

All in all, it was a decent flick. There were emotional moments that tried a little too hard to pull the heartstrings and came off as corny, but otherwise, it was entertaining, if not disturbing when I think about the world we live in.