Middling Sci-Fi with great production value

Rating: 6/10 (27 January 2019)

What Neill Blomkamp does really well with Elysium is creating the world that the story takes place in. Both Earth and Elysium are stunningly realised with great visual effects and production design. There was clearly a lot of care and attention put into this and it immerses you into the world extremely well.
However, the story for me is one that's just fine. It could have explored its ideas and concepts in a lot more detail but overall its paced well enough to keep it mostly engaging.
The characters are also rather bland, except for Sharlto Copley who is hilariously over the top as the villain Kruger and appears to be having a lot of fun in the role. Matt Damon's Max didn't interest me unfortunately and the line delivery of other characters range from fine to poor on most occasions.
In the end there is a lot of potential here, but I feel Blomkamp did a much better job with his first film District 9.