Elysium Is a Great Movie If You Imagine a Golden Retriever Directed It

Warning: slight spoilers.

Here is my experience of watching Elysium from its optimistic first moments through a sinking feeling that maybe this was not such a good movie to the sad realization that the film may have in fact have been written and directed by a golden retriever.

1. Oh, this is nice. It’s dark! Oh, good! It’s nice and cool in here! I like Matt Damon. We are the same age. It makes me feel good to look at him! Ok, it’s Earth in the future, and it’s a shithole. Great slum shots. Neat, they CGIed some slums onto bombed-out skyscrapers. That looks cool. Wait. Matt Damon lives in the slums? I don’t know if I believe that. Oh well. Ok. Why not? Matt Damon in the slums. Fine. He looks good. We look good!

2. Now we’re in this place called Elysium. Elysium is where the rich people live, because Earth is no longer good enough for them. Elysium is exactly like the Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach but in space. They have these glass capsules in their houses and if you are sick and get in one it will cure you. That’s neat. And the poor sick people from earth want to get into the capsules but Jodie Foster, who is in charge of Elysium, and frowns and wears neutral gabardine suits, won’t let them. Wonderful. Who doesn’t love a good class warfare romp?

3. Back to shithole Earth. Wait, it’s the fucking PAST? And Tiny Matt Damon lives in a dusty orphanage? He wants to go to Elysium one day! Well, duh, who wouldn’t? He is friends with a hot girl and he promises to take her to Elysium one day. A kindly nun gives Tiny Matt Damon a locket, with a picture of Earth in it. A sneer forms on the left side of my lip.

4. I wonder if Matt Damon was like, “Hey, can we cut this part where people in the slum who speak Spanish are scornful of the idea that I have a job? Because it’s like, offensive?” and they were like, “Hey, we know you’re from Cambridge and stuff, but why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

5. The cute girl from the dusty orphanage grew up and now works at the hospital Matt Damon goes to when some robots beat him up. So is she a doctor or a nurse? The answer: It doesn’t matter. She is hot, and she helps people! What more do you need to know? God!

6. Matt Damon’s shitty job is manufacturing robots similar to the ones who beat him up and this is a decent enough metaphor for the way we live now that I momentarily forgive that Matt Damon managed to reach 40 while his female childhood companion has miraculously stayed in her late 20s.

7. Matt Damon now has radiation poisoning and needs to get to a healing pod, stat. This is neither here nor there, of more immediate concern to me is this: why did a group of Spanish-accented Criminals of Unspecified Ethnicity just install a robo-skeleton/robo-exoskeleton into Matt Damon? I turn to my sci-fi loving date. “I’m so confused,” I say. He looks at me scornfully and asks “Why?”

8. Do they not have hard drives in the future? Why does everything need to be loaded into Matt Damon’s brain? The Unspecified Hot Health Care Worker’s daughter has leukemia. What?

9. The robo-skeleton/robo-exoskeleton’s purpose has become clear as Matt Damon is doing regular battle with a villain who also has something that resembles though is not exactly a robo-skeleton/robo-exoskeleton. At least it feels like Matt Damon and the villain belong in the same movie, which is more than I can say about Matt Damon and his radiation poisoning, which seems to have occurred about fourteen years ago, in another film altogether.

10. You can’t have a nun give Tiny Matt Damon a locket on Earth in Act 1 without Dying Matt Damon taking the locket out in Elysium in Act 3. The locket held a picture of Earth, and he went on at some length about how beautiful earth was, and how the nun told him to never forget that was where he came from. And I thought about how I sat down two hours before thinking I was about to watch a movie about poverty, wealth and possibly Obamacare, and I thought, well, if the movie can’t remember where it came from, why should Matt Damon bother remembering?

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl. She lives in Nevada City, CA.