Elysium sucked.

Worse, it sucked as a follow-up to a far superior film, so in comparison, it sucks even more. Elysium was announced immediately after District 9’s success back in 2009, and it’s been four long years of tight secrecy, minimal trailers, and heightening anticipation. And it sucked. Sure, it’s not a complete disaster. There are some nice visuals, and…well, actually, that’s about it. It doesn’t work as an action film, or thriller, or political soapbox, or science fiction. It just doesn’t work.

Matt Damon, who does not do a good job of pulling off bald, turns in his worst performance in years as Max, an ex-con current-factory worker who does his best to joke around with hostile robots although he knows they don’t get jokes and will respond violently. Despite offers to return to his criminal lifestyle, he wants to stay on the right side of the law. Why? No idea. We don’t know why Max got into crime, or why he got out, or really anything about him, except that he’s kind’ve a dick. We’re not going to learn anything about him over the course of this film. Oh yeah, except during a flashback a nun tells him that he’s Special, and Destined to Do Something Important, that will Save the World. Remember that, it’s relevant.

All of Earth is a slum, so the rich and powerful have abandoned it in favor of Elysium, an orbiting spaceship where life is pretty fucking sweet and every home has a medical bed that can literally fix anything. Stage 11 cancer? Can do. Chainsaw through the sternum? Child’s play. Earth doesn’t have these machines, which is a pretty big plot point. Why, exactly, they don’t have these machines will never be explained. This is kind of a recurring theme.

Our plot is set in motion when Max gets himself locked inside a machine at work and fried with radiation, then loses his job and gets kicked out on his ass with an expiration date of five days, although not before a medical robot gives him medication to keep him functioning until death. It’s hard to imagine why a company that openly doesn’t give a fuck about its workers and abandons them to die without a qualm simultaneously cares enough to give them expensive medication instead of a crowbar to the skull, but hey, this movie doesn’t make fucking sense. Max knows the healing machines on Elysium can fix him right up so he strikes a deal with a local altruistic crime boss who fits him up with an exoskeleton and a USB 4.0 port Matrixed into the side of his head.

Meanwhile, Jodie Foster is making as many bad decisions as she can during her approximately six minutes of screentime. She’s the secretary of defense up on Elysium and has disagreements with the president over how lethally they should defend Elysium against people from Earth hoping to join. So instead of having her mercenaries just cap the president and then assume control herself, she cooks up a complex plan with the guy who designed the computer system that involves rebooting everything and coding in some changes, namely, who the new president is, which for some reason would give her control of everything. Apparently this computer system isn’t designed for natural changes like when one president resigns and you need to update it with the new president.

The computer guy then heads down to Earth before making the changes for reasons that aren’t clear and is attacked by Max and friends because he’s the guy they need to break into Elysium, coincidentally. They download the new changes to Elysium he was going to make and install it into Max’s brain instead of a thumb drive, for reasons that aren’t clear.

Poorly choreographed action sequences ensue, and Max’s childhood friend Frey, who has a kid suffering from standard I’m Gonna Die Soon sickness, joins him to try and get her daughter to Elysium. She saves Max’s life, then begs him for help, and he tells her to fuck off. Have I mentioned he’s kind’ve a dick?

Anyway, through some wacky hijinks, they all make it up to Elysium, there’s some fight scenes, Jodie Foster is unceremoniously killed, and finally Max and the crime lord make it into the mainframe. The crime lord then writes a few lines of code to insert into the reboot protocol inside Max’s brain since he’s a computer genius and can of course completely understand an entire software program he’s never seen or used before, which will make the computer program encode the entire planet’s population as citizens of Elysium which means all of the robots that look after things will start treating them and healing them! Except Max won’t survive, for reasons that aren’t explained. Even though it’s already been clearly established that these healing beds can bring you back to life if you were killed recently so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t pop him in one after doing the transfer and he’ll be right as rain. But anyway, faced with a no-win situation where he’s going to be dead regardless of what happens, Max says ok and they reboot the system and everyone wins except Max, who is dead.

Until of course when the people who are in control go back in and reboot the system and things return to precisely the way they were before this clusterfuck of a movie.

I feel like I’m nitpicking a lot, and to some extent, I am, but that isn’t even my intention. Any sci-fi movie is going to have plot holes in, and I can take that. All I ask is that you don’t openly insult my intelligence, and give me a character I can identify with. Hell, if I have someone to root for, I’ll deliberately suspend my disbelief just so I can enjoy the movie. The real problem is I don’t give a fuck about anyone in this movie. Max is an asshole with no characterization. I don’t know what he wants or why he does what he does, and trying to pretend he’s the Chosen One when he only begrudgingly agrees to sort’ve save humanity because he doesn’t have any other choice is idiotic. Jodie Foster is developed even less, and is far too incompetent to even serve as a one-dimensional villain. Frey? Give me a break.

Finally, I should probably address the Point of this movie, which appears to be about healthcare. It doesn’t do a particularly good job of making this point, since basically everyone except for the crime lord is only motivated by selfish reasons and they only manage to give universal health care to the world due to a lucky break and an accidental side effect to their main goal. If I were making this movie, I’d probably establish the crime lord as someone genuinely motivated for the betterment of humanity who wants to get to Elysium to bring their life-saving technology back to earth. But he needs an effective killing machine with a death wish in order to do that, and opportunity strikes when he meets Max who just has five days to live. At some point, I’d establish that while these healing machines are incredibly effective they’re also extremely expensive to run, and maybe that the world’s wealthiest could afford to make healthcare available but don’t do so because they care more about their bottom line, which would actually establish an in-universe explanation for why things are the way they are instead of just avoiding the entire fucking subject. But, that’s because I like making movies where things actually make logical fucking sense.

As it is, absolutely nothing is explained, and there’s really no reason why this healing machines are down on earth healing people while simultaneously making enormous profits for the companies that own them because if you can instantly fix any problem you can charge $20 a pop and will still earn trillions because people will never stop getting sick.

Don’t go see Elysium. It’s a bad movie. Go rent, or better yet buy, District 9. It is far superior in every possible way.