I watched this film, at the Imax theatre in Ontario. I wanted to see it since it was a SCI-FI futuristic film. The idea was that at some point in the future the world’s wealthy citizens created this massive space station, called Elysium. It was so massive it had its own atmosphere and gravity. It also had machines that were capable of healing any disease or fix any broken bone or aliment. The citizens of the earth did not have these advanced healing machines. Also, the earth was in some sort of post war scenario. It starred Matt Damon, as an average working stiff on earth, who one day gets severe radiation poising while at work, leaving him with only 6 days to live. In his former life, he was some sort of criminal, who had turned his life around. Determined to heal himself, he decides to make a deal with the devil sort of, with a former colleague in crime, in order to get a passport to leave the planet and enter Elysium. That’s about as much as I will go into the plot of this movie. This is the largest problem I had, not that he is trying to heal himself, but because I just cannot believe the rich citizens of planet earth would be so callous as to not give the rest of the poor citizens of the planet even just one machine to heal the sick and needy. Just one machine, if people took turns using it, would be enough to heal thousands of people per year. All you would have to do is, prioritize the healings by most critical and form a line.
Spoiler…
Near the end of the film, Matt Damon is successful in having a ship delivered to Earth, for healing purposes. The ship had at least two dozen healing stations. This, to me, was the biggest problem I had with the film. The rich citizens of Earth were made out to be overly greedy and keeping all of the renovations to themselves without sharing with the truly needy. I had a few other problems with the film in terms of the tech, like the atmosphere of Elysium and some issues with Elysiums defense systems. Also, they really didn’t do any character building of the rich citizens with the exception of Jody Foster, who was made out to be very ruthless.
Other than these issues, this was an enjoyable film, that had a chance to be great.
****
