Butler's Cinema Scene

“ELYSIUM” My rating: C (Opening wide on Aug. 9)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

One classic definition of science fiction is a story that takes a contemporary social or scientific situation and extrapolates how it might play out in the future.

Neil Blomkamp’s “Elysium” should be great sci-fi. Instead it’s a great idea that quickly bogs down in the same sort of slam-bam chaos we’ve been enduring all summer.  (Hell, for as long as I can remember).

As such it’s a distinct step down from Bloomkamp’s debut feture, 2009’s “District Nine,” a savvy futuristic satire of Apartheid involving aliens instead of black people.

We all know about the 1 percent, right? Well, 150 years from now the wealthiest among us have given up on the dying planet Earth and relocated to Elysium, a big, sleek space station rotating in orbit.

There the lawns are all manicured, the foliage is lush, the people are rich and beautiful, and the technology so advanced that every home has a machine that diagnoses illnesses or physical damage and cures the patient in a matter of minutes.

Back on terra firma the vast mass of humanity lives in conditions that suggest a South American favela that has spread to cover the entire planet. Everyone dreams of going to Elysium; a few actually make it thanks to smugglers who make illegal shuttle runs.

Max (Matt Damon, head shaved, heavily tattooed) is an ex-con working in an L.A. factory making ‘droids. Thanks to his criminal past he’s always being hassled by the cops (actually robots) and spends a lot of time talking to his parole officer (a robotic mannequin so primitive it looks like one of those fortune tellers in a turn-of-the-last-century penny arcade).

Jodie Foster

But when Max is accidentally given a lethal dose of radiation on the job, he realizes his only hope is to make it to Elysium for a quick cure.

To earn his passage on an illegal shuttle, Max – outfitted with an exoskeleton that gives him added strength — must steal some important data from a corporate bigwig (William Fichtner) currently visiting Earth.  That priceless info ends up being downloaded into Max’s brain.

Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga

Up on Elysium the ruthless security chief (Jodie Foster) is planning a coup but needs the data in our hero’s head. She assigns a mad-dog secret agent (Sharlto Copley, star of “District Nine”) to bring Max down.

Along for the wild ride are our hero’s childhood friend (Alice Braga) and her little girl, who’s dying of leukemia.

As was the case with “District 9,” Bloomkamp deftly blends handheld camera work with terrifically complex special effects to create a plausible world.

But once you take in the concept of the rich abandoning the Earth and leaving the rest of us to sink into the morass, there’s nothing to distinguish “Elysium” from any number of other dystopian future flicks that devolve into noisy smackdowns.

Not even the usually reliable Damon can make this terribly interesting. And some of the performances are so bad they make your teeth hurt. Foster is pure ham here -– she should consider giving back one of her Oscars. And Copley, so terrific in “District 9,” is like one of the slobbering maniac villains of an early “Mad Max” film.

| Robert W. Butler