Good but not Outstanding.

Rating: 7/10 (21 August 2013)

"Elysium" is a visually stunning Science-Fiction parable that - halfway through the movie - loses its socially critical aspirations for the benefit of common action scenes with lots of shooting and fighting and projectiles exploding in slow motion.
Neill Blomkamp certainly had a strong vision; he created a dirty, overpopulated, ruined world ridden by poverty and violence, a world we can very well relate to since it too obviously resembles areas and spots we all - once in a while - happen to see on the news when there is again a report on the favelas in Brazil or townships of South Africa or any other slums or war areas for instance, and we feel relieved to have escaped such a hard fate just because we were luckily born in a rich industrial country. And such an idealized industrial country can be interpreted as the eponymous space station "Elysium" where the few rich ones are living like Greek gods in heaven looking down at the Earth in disgust for all the miserable people down there to whom they feel so much superior. There we have it: the metaphorical north-south divide!
All this would have been enough to make it a very profound and deep SiFi-Classic if Blomkamp had not wanted to combine it with the typical Hollywood summer blockbuster action booster pack including a more or less secondary love story plus an obligatory sadistic sociopath named Kruger thus losing track of his original path and - which is worse - giving away much of its suspense and substance because he very soon gets caught up in predictable Popcorn movie patterns. Very much like its more artistically innovative predecessor "District 9", "Elysium" seems not thought through down to the last detail, many questions are not answered, too many things are assumed or just not explained, there is no background story either, there are certain issues with logic, and we are not offered a sufficiently satisfying depiction of the futuristic political and economical conditions.
So we have to take the world's premise for granted in which the main character Max (Matt Damon), a common worker and former thief, somewhat clumsily (he is not trained after all) struggles to find a way up to "Elysium", like so many terrestrials before him, where he wants to use one of the local Med-Pods that miraculously can cure any illness and injury in order to save his own life thus teaming up with a bunch of outlaws who enforce him with a strength-enhancing exoskeleton which for some reason no one else wanted to wear. Unfortunately, he has very powerful enemies, above all the Secretary of Defense D. Rhodes whose zero-tolerance immigration policy threatens to foil his plans. Jodie Foster plays Rhodes with such an eccentric, cold-hearted charm that it's really a pity that Blomkamp's script also lost focus on her amidst all the beamy and bulky action intervals.
While "District 9" worked better as a classical SiFi-parable in spite of its many logical flaws, Blomkamp's latest contribution to the genre, may be a bit too simplistic and underdeveloped to have a lasting impact on the audience, however, it is nevertheless an impressive eye candy for any real SiFi-fan.