“Big Disappointment”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Elysium is a big movie with big ideas that takes place in 2154 and stars Matt Damon as Max, a man stuck on Earth when all the rich and powerful live on an orbiting space station called Elysium.

It is as if the Occupy Wall Street movement became so successful that it spread into Occupy Earth and all the banksters moved out and way up.

In other words, as the inscription for the Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” that idea, too, has become so successful that now the whole planet is diseased, polluted, and vastly overpopulated.

Not only that, but the people up on Elysium have technology that can cure whatever disease or affliction ails you, but only people who are classified as “citizens” can arrive safely on the space station, which means that there are also attempts by the people on earth to use illegal space shuttles to sneak across space and get onto Elysium.

Anyway, Max is a factory worker who accidentally gets exposed to radiation and will die in five days unless he can do something about it.

So, Max has the contacts to get himself outfitted with a metallic exoskeleton that makes him as strong as the police robots he will have to fight, his brain gets implanted with data that is very important to the government on Elysium, and he plans to take an illegal space shuttle up to the space station and solve all the problems for the huddled masses on earth and himself, as well.

However, Jodie Foster stars as the director of Homeland Security up on Elysium, and she will have none of it.

Unfortunately for the audience, Foster speaks with an annoying and distinctive accent that makes her and her character a joke.

Well, you can imagine that there are big problems, big fights, and big explosions involved in Max’s attempt to save the world and himself, not to mention the lives of his former girlfriend and her daughter, who is suffering from leukemia.

Oh, I didn’t mention that, did I?

Elysium is one big disappointment, starting with the story, continuing with Jodie Foster, and concluding especially with the ending itself, which I guess means that it is at least three big disappointments, if not even more.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”