Fun sci-fi action that tries to have an actual moral

Rating: 7/10 (14 May 2014)

Elysium, first off there's something one should really know about this movie. The end is Matt Damon getting into a Cyborg fight with a samurai sword involved while in space. If that sounds kickass to you, then you'll probably have a good time watching this.
But beyond the well directed action scenes, and some beautiful FX work, the story of Elysium feels rather too small for the big screen. It feels like District 9, but less personal, or "Source Code", that's a good comparison. There's neither a real personal attachment to our protagonist and his struggles, where he comes off a bit too much of a "generic everyman with generic feeling problems".
Nor yet is there some overwhelming feeling of attachment to large events. Elysium, the super cool looking space station, feels like an abstraction. We never get to know about the people there, what they're like, who they are, what the station is about. So when the fate of the station hangs in the balance we just kind of shrug.
The same goes for the people of this future Earth. Beyond "shitty" we don't really get a sense of place or purpose. Is the whole world like this, is it just LA, what is the world even like? We don't even get to see much of beyond a few locales Damon visits.
The second problem is with the morale of the whole thing. What exactly is it? It feels like there should be one, like it's trying to say something or other about... healthcare. But what it's trying to say beyond "it would be really nice if there were enough cool robot doctors to treat everyone on the planet" isn't really clear.
Which is a shame, because an action movie with an actual moral beyond some idiotic and meaningless platitudes/totally weird megalomaniacal plots like in The Dark Knight or The Winter Soldier would be nice. Like something that makes sense and people can relate too. And Elysium feels like it wants to have a morale like that, but can never quite decide what exactly it is so viewers are left feeling like they were hit over the head by very vague and unclear morality tale.
But let's go back to the beginning. Because I said there was a cyborg fight in space involving a Katana. And it did indeed kick ass, and there were more such moments all throughout, interspersed with awesome sci-fi eye candy and solid acting jobs from Matt Damon and Sharto Copley, even if neither really had some sort of overarching bigger story to add too.