yes it's flawed... but

Rating: 8/10 (12 March 2014)

...isn't every Sci-Fi movie flawed? Elysium has its plot holes and certainly some of the contradictions, i.e weaponry undermines the 'credibility' (given that credibility is inherently absent in sci-fi: hence the term science fiction aka not possible). Early on our hero uses three large calibre bullets which explode next to a droid and reduce it to 'dust'. Two minutes later a car he is traveling in is hit with two armor piercing missiles which just turn the car over? Now I know that bigger doesn't always mean better but when it's bullets or missiles that exception never applies.
If we can forgive this and other over sights and, as is necessary in all space sci-fi/sci-fantasy movies, we suspend Newtons laws on gravity, invent the total regeneration medical scanner and human cyborgs...we have a damned fine movie... Good actors, Good CGI and an EXCELLENT metaphor for our times..
A handful of obscenely rich (lets say 1500 or the Forbes rich list) control everything from an ivory tower. In this case it's Elysium, a space station; and the handful of obscenely rich people who live in Elysium have at their disposal the means to make the Earth a better place:
In the movie it's a whole fleet of medical ships which represent the 1.3 trillion $ the Forbes rich keep from the poor....
All they have to do to make the World a better place is share the wealth (resources) of Elysium. But sadly it's just too difficult for the rich in the ivory tower to come down and join Humanity.
It then takes a cyborg terrorist to go up and force them to do so.... not too far from the current paradigm.
So whilst it is sci-fi as regards the elysium space station, space flight and robots its a damned good metaphor for the current state of life on this planet: so worthy of a nine!