Enjoyable action romp/blunt force political allegory

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2013)

Elysium is the second feature length effort from Neill Blomkamp whose District 9 was a brilliant debut that covered many of the socio- political issues present in Elysium with a dose more subtlety. It must be said that Elysium is never boring as music cues and startling shots of the space station thingy and an overpopulated Los Angeles do a great job of establishing a back story sans dialogue. However, as effective with pacing as the film can be it has an over-reliance on musical cues during emotional moments and a heady use of metaphors in the dialogue that don't give the audience much credit when it comes to connecting the dots.
My gripes with the heavy handedness aside, projects such as this that set out to insert messages about other political issues such as overpopulation within the confines of a studio system is something worth commending. These issues may often fall by the wayside as the focus is often drawn to fetishizing the action into making it look as cool as possible, but the action never fully dilutes the political messages and remain quite cool to watch.
I wasn't a huge fan of the gutter mouthed Sharlto Copley as the antagonist who's over the top nature and South African accent shone a light on how bad some of his dialogue was. Added to this I found his dialogue so riddled with swear words that my fragile ears could simply not permit it outside of the context of a dockworker stubbing his toe.
Matt Damon's performance was one of my personal favourite's I've seen from him and the film had me pondering issues and stuff during and after the run time which is damn fine value for $12 on a student discount. I'd recommend seeing Elysium, but there's a lingering sense that it could have been executed far better in some easy to fix areas.