This movie is a wretched piece of shit.
Am I being overly harsh? Is that really important right now with people dying in Syria?
Anyway the commercial for this was one of the best I’ve seen. I had a Sci hard on. It looked like the movie was going to do a little Tarrantinoesque borrowing and have some Neuromancer fight scenes which, combined with the direction of Neil Blomkamp (who burst onto the scene with District 9, his sci-fi/kafka epic, which has made me wetter for a sequel than any movie since Starman) and the acting talents of Sharlto Copley, Matt Damon, and Jodie Foster would at least be okay. And probably epic. Well it was epic. It was an epic abortion.
The movie has the basic issue of being boring and preachy but I’ll get back to that in a moment. It has a basic plot issue that annoyed me for the whole movie. Attend:
All the rich people in the future are white or Indian (dot) and live off Earth on a luxury space station. All the poor people on Earth are Mexican or Matt Damon. The rich have these special beds which can restructure your atoms and as such can cure most (all? it was unclear) disease. Every so often the poor people get together to launch a spaceship to try and land on the space station and try to storm someone’s house to get their sick kids or what have you into one of the beds. (the space station security isn’t allowed to shoot them if they can land their ship) Let that sink in for a moment.
Matt Damon, who’s trying to keep clean and fly straight ends up sick with something and needs to storm the station. He chats up his former criminal friends and they graft a cybernetic exoskeleton onto his spine in some dude’s garage and they go attack the station to make the beds open for all.
So why does a group of people who posses the engineering knowledge to regularly launch precision space attacks from a planet to a satellite and the medical chops to perform a spinal cyborg graft in some dude’s garage need to go through all this effort for healthcare? Seriously? If you can do some garage spine surgery I think you can handle cutting out some cancer cells. Also assaulting the country club death star also speaks of a rather firm command of science. And the people in the station? How many missiles does a magic healing bed cost? I bet you’ve spent that many so far. The conflict at the center of the film is essentially just fucking stupid and that effects the entire film.
The actors are all their awesome selves. Although it seems like Jodie Foster is aware how dumb her character is and is deliberately being a caricature. Some of the future stuff like the automated parole officer could have been good if the core of the movie wasn’t lazy. Which just makes you further annoyed by the heavy immigration/racial social commentary.
But Killer Klowns from Outer Space has a better plot. Avoid this piece of shit.