About as poorly thought-out as its obvious political message

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2019)

The biggest shock here for me was to see a film so completely righteously heavy-handed also stay incredibly and disappointingly simplistic. Blomkamp, much like in DISTRICT 9, does an excellent job setting up a world at the start where we're fascinated to see in which direction the story will go to expose the inner corruption of the system. Unfortunately we don't really get much more than a dumb action movie with a bunch of fight scenes coupled with some extremely blatant leftist propaganda.
So the Halo-like space station orbiting earth now houses all the best and the brightest while the unwashed and diseased masses team in mountains of garbage looking for their excuse to get up onto the space station as well. The film makes it a point to focus more on the medical side of things to show that the "illegals" just want access to the same health care as the rich, particularly for their terminally ill children. This just went a little too far in my opinion in trying to paint the earth people as saintly caretakers looking after their children. They are apparently not economic climbers eager to better their own quality of life by leaving the earth as opposed to cleaning things up and working toward a more just society where they are with what they have. Also, the rich people obviously must be evil for withholding low-cost in-home instantaneous miracle cures from the poor with no mention in the film as to what the real ramifications of such socialized medicine would be long-term.
Jodie Foster, usually a capable performer, turns in a shockingly awful performance about as credible as the sneering villain from TIME CHASERS, complete with a similarly artificial accent. Matt Damon does an okay job as the protagonist much better suited to the dramatic acting than he is to the punch-out action scenes later in the film. I'm still not entirely sure why he, a white person, would be raised in a hispanic slum in the first place, other than to hypocritically white-wash an otherwise heavily leftist film which depicts every other white person as a sociopath and/or rapist. The only person who seems to be enjoying himself here is Sharlto Copley as the shirtless and tatted-up evil gang leader, which I've come to see is a trope that Blomkamp loves to repeat, along with the robot designs which pop up again in CHAPPIE, a similarly underwhelming and frustrating film. The last 20 minutes of the film are easily the worst, as we watch characters go through the motions toward a sadly inevitable conclusion that doesn't explore any of the rich universe it worked so hard to build in the first 20 minutes.
In the better, nonexistent sequel, we'd see that Elysium gets overrun by economic migrants with vast tent cities eating up all the resources, and the rich ruling class has to either build another, better protected space station, or just allows itself to be enveloped by the class it spent so much money escaping. A much more interesting film would have spent more effort developing both sides of the argument, but that wouldn't be seen as too politically correct. I would love to think Blomkamp was actually in on the joke the whole time and somehow thought he was subverting how short-sighted the politics of the film really are, but there's very little actual evidence to support that any real thought went into the script.
Good effects though.