The movie Elysium begins with a flashback. You can tell because it has the slightly out-of-focus, off-color look of an Instagram shot and the dialog sounds like you’re hearing it from the far end of a tunnel. The flashback introduces you to Max and Frey and shows you that they were childhood sweethearts. It also introduces you to Elysium, a classic bicycle-wheel space habitat so large that Max can see it from the roof of the orphanage where he was raised. Elysium is where all the rich people went to live when the Earth became so overpopulated it was nothing but a great big slum.

Max wants to go to Elysium, but a nun from the orphanage says he can’t because it costs too much. The “costs too much” reason gets repeated several times, even though, later in the movie, forty or fifty refugees pile into a space shuttle no bigger or more impressive-looking than a school bus that can fly straight up to Elysium in about ten minutes, so why it would be so expensive to get there was kind of lost on me. But Max promises Frey that someday they’ll live on Elysium together.

Flash-forward to Max’s present day, when he lives in a cinder-block hovel in Los Angeles. It turns out he’s been a bad boy while he was growing up. A couple of police droids single him out for questioning while he’s waiting in line for the bus to his factory job, and they beat him up badly enough that he has to go to a hospital where he finds out Frey works as a nurse, a coincidence that O. Henry would have been proud to have thought of. Max sweet-talks Frey until she agrees to meet him for coffee later.

Just as an aside, I wonder if Matt Damon (who plays Max) is as charming with women in real life as he is in movies? I can’t recall a scene in any of his movies where he wasn’t at least as charming when meeting women as Cary Grant. Now that I think of it, I’d love to see him play the Cary Grant part in a remake of North By Northwest. How awesome would that be?

Well, they never have that coffee, because Max works in the factory making the same kind of droids that kicked the shit out of him that morning. Wow, ironic, no? (No.) Not that getting beaten up by steel robots keeps him from working. He’s Matt Damon, after all. Kick the shit out of him, slap a couple band-aids on the cuts and he’s good for some heavy lifting in the next scene.

Shower him with a lethal dose of radiation, though, and he’s not so good to go anymore. He’s not playing Bruce Banner, he’s playing Max, who is a Jason Bourne-like badass but, still. His foreman orders him into a giant microwave oven where the droids are zapped. “Either you go in there, or I find someone who will and you can go clean out your locker.” Sure, I’ll bet there’s all kinds of competition for the job of going into the room full of deadly radiation. When Max hesitates, the foreman gets pissed because, Hey, he’s holding up production. So Max finally caves under pressure, squeezes past the jammed door and starts yanking on a pallet that it’s hung up on.

You know what’s coming, right? As soon as the pallet comes loose, the door slams shut and the microwave oven automatically starts baking everything inside, even though a warning on the computer monitor just outside the door flashes “ORGANIC MATERIAL DETECTED.” Why does it keeps on zapping everything inside when it knows there’s something in there that shouldn’t be? I dunno.

The whole factory has to shut down while a droid comes to drag Max out of the microwave oven.

Two things:

In a previous scene, Max pushes a bunch of droids into the oven, shuts the door, bakes the droids. The oven is safe enough to walk into when it isn’t baking droids. After Max’s accident, though, it’s so dangerously radioactive that the whole factory has to be shut down and evacuated, then a droid has to drag Max out of it. Sure. Makes perfect sense.

Second, if the foreman is so concerned about keeping production moving on the assembly line, why does he order Max to go into the oven to yank the pallet out of the jammed door when it’s a fifty-fifty bet that the door will slam shut with Max in there, requiring the foreman to shut down the whole freakin’ factory?

The CEO of the company, who steps in to see what’s going on, never asks these or any other questions. He’s supposed to be the brains of the operation, yet all he’s worried about is that Max will soil the paper towel on the bed in the company’s sick bay. Max is given some radiation-sickness pills, told by the medical droid he will die in five days, given a heartfelt thank-you for his service by the droid and discharged.

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, Frey’s daughter is dying of leukemia. All this terminal disease is relevant because on Elysium there are these “medical bays” that look exactly like tanning beds, but the bright lights scan you for illness, then “reatomize” your body which, I guess, means it rebuilds every atom in you except for the ones that are part of your illness, because anyone who steps into a medical bay steps out perfectly healthy. You learn this in a scene where that school bus/shuttle full of refugees lands on Elysium. The refugees pour out and run for the houses. Police droids catch all but two, a crippled girl and her mother who gets her to a medical bay, where the girl’s legs are healed. Happy happy, joy joy. Until the police droids catch them.

Although medical bays are such common appliances on Elysium that every house has one, nobody on Earth has one. Literally nobody. That’s why people are desperate enough to get on a school bus shuttle and risk getting shot out of space by the evil defense minister for a million-to-one chance of using a medical bay before the police droids catch them. Even more weirdly, several space shuttles as big as brick-and-mortal hospitals, each one filled with rows of medical bays, are sent to Earth later in the movie to heal the sick people, because of course you’d have those just sitting around in your shuttle hangar for years if you didn’t want to share technology like that with Earth.

So now that Max has been zapped with deadly radiation, and now that Frey’s daughter is dying of leukemia, they both have compelling reasons to get to Elysium. I guess realizing a childhood dream of going there to live together wasn’t compelling enough. But what the hell, radiation sickness gives the film makers an excuse to trick out Matt Damon with a super-soldier powered exoskeleton so he can beat the snot out of every droid and the hit man sent after him. Which he does. A lot. He has to after he agrees to go on a very dangerous mission in order to earn his ticket to Elysium from the bad guy he used to work for. And the dying daughter is the excuse that makes Frey go with Max even though he’s doing bad stuff again that makes bad people come after her, too.

What a mess, eh? I mean, it started out good enough. I would have loved to watch the movie where Max and Frey figured out how to get to the big bicycle wheel in the sky using their smarts or even just some good luck. Or, I would have enjoyed the movie about Max the car thief who tried to turn to the straight and narrow but had to become an ass-kicking Robin Hood, sticking it to the evil defense minister (deliciously played by Jody Foster). Or I would have even watched the movie about the dystopian society that wouldn’t let the poors have medical bays, which, if it was handled right, could have been relevant and even a little bit snarky. But the movie I watched turned out like the grey mess I make whenever I try to cook. The ingredients are fine, each on their own but, just like this movie, they don’t go together so they turn into a delicious dish.