Turns out even re-heated and big-studio-ized, Blomkamp's material is worth your time

Rating: 7/10 (16 August 2013)

In a world with a class divide so wide it's fatal to those on the lower end, with professional health care out of their reach, and people will go far to save their loved ones, including illegal immigration in spite of it being extremely risky... well, this movie was made(I had to go there). And those issues are addressed, albeit the heavy-handed-ness and naivety of their handling grows exponentially from the first to the last I mentioned. The rich live on Elysium(where we spend little time, making us "miss it", cherish what we do get, similar to The Hulk in The Avengers - with that said, at the end of the day, it does wind up feeling over-hyped, and the third act is when the low-level generic and predictable aspects double in concentration), named after the Ancient Greek version of paradise, where only the gods could go - presumably titled after Prometheus scored some points with the pretentious. It has magic healing beds. And... actually, that might be it. We learn nearly nothing about it, or the people of it. Except that it is as nice as Earth used to be, before it became one big third-world slum.
Max(Damon, rendering sympathetic a not very fleshed out classic hero) is one of the 99% living there, with stop-and-frisks, police robot brutality(getting sarcastic with one of these AI will get you beaten up and/or offered meds) and awful jobs that you're lucky to even have. He dreams of ascending to the titular space station, and once he contracts cancer and has five days to live, he decides that it's time. Desperate, he agrees to have an exo-skeleton attached to him(yeah, it ain't a suit... we see the nasty, gut-wrenching surgery procedure; nearly every instance of violence in this is short and painful, making us feel every broken bone), and tries to go there. He will have to contend with the Secretary of Defense Delacourt(Foster as a hammy ice-queen, seeming determined to prove she can do horrible acting - she is one of the only two performances that are unintentionally funny, and the other one, Moura's Hollywood hacker Spider, is much less bothersome) and her asset, the creepy, insane hobo-beard of Kruger(Copley, giving us a truly despicably villain).
Neill had to prove that District 9 wasn't just a fluke, and in spite of the heavily reused elements and structure(their freshness now grown stale), the more conventional approach here and the earlier mentioned preachy, idealistic take on these very current issues(thus serving more to add emotion than information to a complicated, nuanced issue; and yes, I am a bleeding heart Lib), he shows that he is near the top of the short list of sci-fi(the tech looks advanced and yet slapped together - utilitarian) directors to keep an eye on today. I do hope he gets help on the writing, as the dialog can be unwieldy, the plot bloated and this simultaneously goes to great lengths to craft impossible-to-overcome problems, and contrive ridiculously convenient fix-all solutions to them. The world is detailed and feels like we're already there, with the prevalent realism heightening the intensity of the appropriate-in-amount-and-length action scenes - think '88 John McClane. Use of slow-mo and hand-held camera, while infrequent, are the only real negative of these exciting sequences. Build-up to them is solid, at times swift and subtle, with sudden bursts of thrills, seldom anticipated and thus all the more effective.
There is a lot of strong language and disturbing content in this. I recommend this to any fan of supplementing their Summer blockbuster with a side of social commentary - provided they can live with it being more focused on flavor than nutrition. 7/10