I went to see Elysium because it seemed like it might be an interesting political allegory, and Matt Damon was in it (if there’s one guy in Hollywood who tends to pick decent scripts and good characters, it’s him.) What I discovered is that Matt Damon is completely wasted in the film because he plays a robotized near-mute for all but ten minutes of it, and the political allegory is wasted on an insulting and idiotic plot designed solely to set up a solid hour of loud, badly filmed, badly choreographed and hugely tiresome robot fighting scenes. The film’s characters are grating and uninteresting to the last, and every plot element is contrived to the point of absurdity. Moreover, I found the film’s sociopolitical ideas to be surprisingly reactionary – it depicts rich people as victims of their government, it depicts poor people as violent and immoral thugs who need the rich to save them, and it basically posits organized crime, coupled with the fantastical emergence of a crypto-religious savior figure, as the social vehicle to address and mitigate human suffering.

It’s simply embarrassing to compare Elysium to the identically-themed In Time (2011,) a film which Elysium clearly (and incompetently) rips off, a film which unlike Elysium was critically panned and universally ignored. They both feature core allegories in which rich people are so in control of everything that they basically live in another world, and everyone else is trapped in unending despair. Their plots are virtually identical: a common man rises up to challenge the system, somewhat accidentally and somewhat desperately. They also both feature the core narrative idea that humans are in some critical way now part machine. But the unheralded In Time annihilates Elysium in every conceivable way: story coherence, intellectual interest, emotional impact, dialog quality, casting, character development, narrative dexterity in dealing with futuristic concepts, and most of all the sophistication and relevance of its sociopolitical ideas and the cleverness and depth of its central allegory.

I should mention the only reason I’m being so measured in this review of Elysium is I don’t want to write a plot summary of this piece of shit, which is what I would need to do if I were to give it the ripping it deserves. But I will tell you this: my wife and I found this film unremittingly awful, and left the theater profoundly depressed and angry, feeling that we deserved our money back. You want to watch a Sci Fi allegory about our current society? Netflix In Time. The only thing you’re going to get from Elysium is a headache, and a lot of fucked up ideas.