I don't know what Jodi Foster's accent is supposed to be, but it's not a very convincing one. It's not quite as bad as the in-and-out accent of Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, but that doesn't make it good.
So, the Earth is full of disease and poverty, and all of the rich people have escaped to a satellite called Elysium. The movie tried to get the District 9 feel of slums. The difference here is that the whole planet is slums. YEA! A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE! There are some subtle parallels between the wealth imbalance in the US, and when I say subtle, I am being sarcastic. Likewise, every random person on the street is Hispanic, and every random person in orbit is white. Subtle.
So, Jodi Foster is the manager of the space station. It is unclear what legalities have transpired, but she is referred to as "Secretary" and she appears to report to the president of something. The whole government and social services of the planet are really kind of hard to understand, but they want you to know that there are privileged white people and people of color are SOL. Jodi plays a really uptight woman who honestly doesn't let on enough that she's under as much stress as someone orchestrating a government coup would be under.
All of the government administrators and police are robots, so the officials don't have to come down and breathe the polluted air. They do a pretty good job of setting up the environment and rampant poverty. It's kind of unclear why there has been no peasant uprising or even a microeconomy of different levels of wealth inside the poverty-stricken planet. I guess the robots would keep order, but I can't imagine that would last for long. Also, where are the wealthy liberals? Hell, where are the outreach groups that are typically funded by conservative groups?
Matt Damon is the hero here, and born a poor black boy in the middle of Mexico. Where is Mexico? It appears to be the entire planet. Also, we have devolved into a single world government that is full of corruption and beats down the lowly peons in favor of the elite and overtly white.
So, Matt does a pretty good job of playing a guy who has a goal and does what he can to achieve it. It seems odd that his radiation sickness is completely overcome within about five minutes of getting cybernetic implants, but he never shows another tiny bit of a side effect through the rest of the movie.
Once the good guys have the keys to the kingdom (someone watched Johny Mnemonic too many times and thought that slapping a hard drive into someone's head sounded like an AWESOME idea) they have to get to the core system (unprotected core system, mind you) and plug Matt in. It will reboot the system and allow them to make everyone a citizen of Elysium. It's a good thing they don't follow normal protocol and have lots of redundancy, backups, and hot failovers.
The movie was an interesting romp, but the heavy-handed social commentary really distracts for the enjoyment.
1.75/5