Elysium - Universal Health Care gone mad

I have a lot of films to review since flying to Chicago and back from New York recently.  On the plane over to the States I watched The Bling Ring, Oblivion and Mud.  On the way back the flight was quite short and the entertainment system a bit more limited, so I re-watched Snatch - nothing new there, still funny as ever.  I'm going to start things off with a film that I went to see at the Chicago AMC, the brand new science fiction action film starring Matt Damon - Elysium.

Here's the plot part of the review.  In a future littered with standard science fiction depictions of society gone wrong, the haves live in a techno wet dream paradise that orbits the Earth named Elysium while the have-nots live on the surface of the planet.  Elysium is an idyllic palace populated by poshos talking in well-received English and the occasional French.  Earth is an extended refuse tip where people scratch out the barest of livings, speaking a mix of street English and Spanish.  Matt Damon plays an every-man who has some unspecified connection to a local crime-lord and once was 'the best' at something, but is now 'out of the game'.  Whatever that is.  After Damon's character Max suffers a near fatal injury at work because of his heartless employers on Elysium, he decides to suit up and steal his way to Elysium to get himself healed up.  Because on Elysium technology means that basically no disease exists, everything is curable, whereas on Earth to get or injured means incapacitation and a life of the scrap heap before a likely early grave.

This is the sort of thing that good science fiction is meant to do.  The problem with Elysium is that it's full of lazy characterisation and even lazier storytelling.  There are the haves, who clearly need to be able to speak French, while the have-nots must speak Mexican-Spanish.  Jodie Foster as the leader of the haves is tediously one-dimensional in her brand of evil, Matt Damon as the every-man we should root for is introduced with such a thin background that the only reason we know he is the hero is because the film tells us he is the hero.  Then there's the South African bounty hunter Kruger (admittedly played with a gleeful nastiness by Shalo Copley), who just runs around killing stuff for no apparent reward and gets to punch and be punched by Matt Damon in the film's numblingly inevitable final fistfight.

Plot holes are littered throughout Elysium.  Why is transporting information in people's brains more secure than standard wireless transmission if it's that easy to kidnap people and download the data?  What is the 'death' fail-safe thing that the information mule guy uses to transport his data?  Is that standard practice?  Wouldn't they use an expendable data mule for that purpose rather than using the chairman of the company if they're going to do that?  Can anyone think of a more obvious target for potential data interceptors?  Also the end makes no sense either, but I don't want to give away any more spoilers.

It doesn't take too much thinking to work out that Elysium is a poorly-disguised essay on the benefits of Universal Health Care.  Given the political shit-storm that has engulfed US politics since Obama's attempts to introduce even the smallest amount of universal healthcare provision in that nation, it is no surprise that a film like this should exist.  No surprise either that the film stars Matt Damon, well known for his liberal political activism.  As a confirmed socialist myself, I am fiercely in favour of universal healthcare and I believe it would do America a lot of good to have something like the NHS to replace their divisive private healthcare system.  But this film isn't going to do a lot of convince the naysayers otherwise.  It's unsubtle in the extreme, full of bad characters, mis-stepping plot lines, unimaginative uses of science fiction tropes and reduces itself to an over-reliance on punching and stabbing to resolve its story-line.  Some good special effects cannot save Elysium, it's a big disappointment.