August 11, 2013 -- This is a science fiction film in which the political point is impossible to miss. It is about a future earth where the good life has been put out of reach -- literally -- to everyone but a few wealthy people. The vast majority of people live on the ruined earth in grinding poverty without access to decent jobs or decent health care. Does this sound familiar? It should.

This is one possible future young people of today could someday witness, if some people get their way. Who would want this? I'll give you a hint. That would be the political party which nominated a presidential candidate who proposed to further reduce taxes on the rich. It's members also recently voted against raising minimum wages and whose members in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted 40 times to deny health care coverage to millions of Americans.

This same political party has contributed heavily to a situation in the United States in which people who are not born wealthy have less of a chance at a better future than they would have if they happened to live in some other countries with more upward mobility. This situation is getting worse every year due to a policy called “trickle-down economics,” only it doesn't work that way. The money doesn't trickle down, instead, institutions which serve the general public are starved as the money flows from them to the already overflowing coffers of the ruling class.

In Elysium, the wealthy people have moved into a giant orbiting space station. While the poor people live in slums on the earth (the slums look like the infamous favelas around Rio). The space station is called Elysium. Max (played by Matt Damon of “The Bourne Identity”) is a former thief who is trying to turn his life around, but he still gets harassed by the robot police, who seem to be just as abusive as some human police. After being exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at the robot factory where he works, his only chance at survival is to somehow go to Elysium, where all the residents have healing devices which can seemingly repair any illness or injury instantaneously.

Ordinarily, a factory worker would have no chance to get to Elysium, but Max has friends in low places, including some rebels -- no doubt descendants of the Occupy Wall Street crowd -- who have a way for Max to get to Elysium. Along the way, Max picks up some passengers, Frey (Alice Brega of “I Am Legend”) and her sick daughter, Matilda (Emma Tremblay). The plot gets even wilder as Max gets Johnny Mnemonic-type download into his head. He ends up with software locked inside his head that can change everything.

Meanwhile, on Elysium, there is a political struggle going on between the top leaders of the government and Secretary Jessica Delacourt (Jodi Foster of “The Brave One”) who wants to use deadly force to preserve the privileges of the wealthy. Delacourt skirts the more humane rules of Elysium by employing deadly mercenaries who operate outside the law, including a South African agent, Kruger (Sharlto Copley of “The A Team”).

This is a decent idea for a movie, but it doesn't quite work as well as it should. The way that Max gets together with Frey and Matilda seems forced and awkward. This could have been structured differently. If Max and Frey were married for instance, it would have strengthened and sharpened Max's motivations in the story. As it is, Max's motivations are strictly personal and selfish. It seems to me the story would have been stronger if Max were a rebel, an idealist, a dreamer, with a motivation to help someone besides himself. Well, that's just me. Perhaps others are more willing to swallow this story than I was.

In order to put Frey and Matilda together with Max, the story depends on a set of coincidences and circumstances which don't ring true. The other problem I had with the movie is the character of Kruger, who is a stone cold killer, but he spares Frey and Matilda and conveniently hauls them up to Elysium so that Max can save Matilda's life. Also Sharlto Copley's South African accent was so thick I could not understand half of what he said, or yelled.

This is a big budget science fiction film with some good special effects and plenty of action. It is not nearly as good a film as it should have been given the talent and money that went into it, but I'll give it a passing grade because I like this genre. I also like the fact that the makers of this film went beyond mere action. It has ideas worth considering. It rates a C+.

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Copyright © 2013 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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