There’s a very fine line between creating excitement and setting high expectations for a movie. Excitement, quite obviously, just means people want to buy a ticket and have fun watching something for 2 hours in a dark theater. High expectations, however, mean that a film has to suddenly meet standards that moviegoers who had nothing to do with the filmmaking process have set in their minds.

Elysium- featuring the breakout director and star of District 9 Neill Blomkamp and Sharlto Copley, Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and a really cool premise- was poised to raise the standards for Summer 2013.

And then it didn’t.

Blomkamp instead has crafted a fractured film- one that spends the first half making a vague statement about classism and the other half being a clumsy, predictable, second-rate sci-fi action flick. Foster and Copley are laughable (in the not-good way) in their roles as co-villains, while even Damon (one of Hollywood’s most reliable leading men) manages to be remarkably lackluster.

The script completely falls apart somewhere in the second act, as if the writer ran out of ideas and then chose to beg, borrow and steal scenes from other big Hollywood films.

Maybe, however, expectations were set too high and the public was hoping for something they were never promised. Maybe we here at Viral Read are being too harsh on Blomkamp’s film.

Or maybe Elysium just isn’t a good movie.

Bottom Line: No thanks.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QILNSgou5BY]