Did not enjoy.

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2017)

After seeing this, I would hire Neil Blomkamp as a director, but not as a writer. He put a lot of pretty good work into building his world here, but in terms of structuring scenes, creating characters, and writing good dialogue, he failed pretty gloriously. I had actually gone into this movie with pretty high expectations, but after an hour I was considering stopping. Once I could see that the story was not in good hands, I lost interest.
The characters were annoying by and large, particularly Kruger. Matt Damon brought a good performance as always, but I am disappointed that he chose to attach himself to a script this bad. But his talent was wasted along with that of all of the well-known actors here. Even worse, there was very inconsistent conflict between them. The whole subplot of Carlyle's power struggle against Delacourt probably should have been left out because it bogged the plot down and didn't need to be there. I found that the movie was better to watch when nobody was talking. There was even a scene where Max was debating with his friends about how to get to Elysium where one of his friends urges Max to go to Elysium, and then a few seconds later is telling him not to because it will never work.
On top of that, the dystopian world that had been created felt like the most basic textbook dystopian society ever and was very forced. The way that the citizens of Elysium treated those on earth with disdain felt too extreme to be real and took me out of the movie whenever it came up. This mostly came up with Willam Fichtner's character John Carlyle. The revolution that ends up taking place at the end of the movie also didn't make that much sense. Yes, I understand that all of the people living on earth want those on Elysium to share their wealth, but the fashion in which they did this would probably just result in chaos instead of equality. I think it might have been better if the story had stuck more with Max helping Matilda and Frey get to Elysium.
The good action choreography made it tolerable to watch, but I didn't find that it was of a quality that sufficiently accounts for the cult following around Neil Blomkamp. I will admit that he has a talent for explosive action and cool set designs, but it was not enough to save the extremely lacking story of this movie. The action is good enough that I would recommend this to people who like explosive and futuristic action set pieces. To anyone else, I would advise that you find something else to watch. Overall Rating: 4.6/10.