Elysium: Matt Damon's Been in the GYM

I spent most of the summer super fired up for Elysium. Dystopic future sci-fi flick with cyborgs and a dash of space combat where Matt Damon fights the man?!? It sounded like some sort of delicious Blade Runner/District 9/Serenity hybrid, and man, I wanted it. I wanted it so bad. It is possible my expectations were a touch high.

Elysium throws you forward to 2144, a time that finds the 1% living on a pimped out satellite and everyone else living on a planet Earth that looks like this. Neill Blomkamp has put together a movie very much designed to hit you repeatedly in the face with the class warfare hammer, but for plot purposes, what you need to know is that there is miraculous medical technology on Elysium that Matt Damon ends up needing pretty severe access to. Thus begins his--and mankind's--struggle for a share of the 1%'s riches. To reach those riches, a local criminal/hacker/mastermind outfits him with a bio-mechanical suit that renders him bad ass.

I don't mind the occasional heavy handed piece of cinema, but man. This is the heaviest hand. Neill Blomkamp has a message, and that message is that shit ain't fair. To his credit, he wraps that message around a pretty good science fiction movie, but it is so damn serious. Don't get me wrong, it's an impressive film to look at, and Matt Damon sells his role, even from behind the cyborg gear. So does Sharlto Copley, last popularly seen as a maniac helicopter pilot in The A-Team. For Elysium, he accesses the same brand of crazy to produce a snarling, kind of rapey black-ops soldier, and he is good at it. His scenes are the best the movie has to offer. Jodie Foster, for the record, kinda blows as the movie's central villain. Is a French accent really that hard, Jodie?

The reality is that at the end of the day, you just don't come away from Elysium that satisfied. I'm not sure what it says about the movie (or frankly about *myself*) that one of the biggest takeaways is how FUCKING YOKED Matt Damon got for the role. Look at this!

Eat a burger, you asshole. You couldn't even pull this kind of fitness off as Jason Bourne. TELL ME ALL THE THINGS YOU (HAVEN'T) BEEN EATING! Anyway, Elysium is worth seeing. It could have been more than that if it weren't so determined not to have any fun.

...I'm gonna go do some sit-ups.

Directed By: Neill Blomkamp

Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley,this guy who's probably been in half the movies you've ever seen.

You Should See it of: You like sci-fi and you don't mind feeling bad about being a rich ass American, because the problem is YOU.