A film desperately missing its female collaborator

Rating: 5/10 (19 August 2013)

It's not even its thematic unoriginality regards Earth's slum-ridden overpopulation and the related notion of gated communities (cf Wall-E(2008), Back to the Future 2(1989)) that is such a disappointment: the biggest problem with Elysium is that it's soulless... Matt Damon and his love interest notwithstanding.
The South African slum redesign of LA is only a little irritating, but the film's ham-fisted and artificial plot device of a desperately sick child is so hackneyed that it doesn't muster any emotion in the audience at all.
Later, the scientific inaccuracies and the glossover depiction of the orbiting habitat will silently irk an informed audience. For instance, there seems no evident cause for, or mechanism by which an atmosphere is maintained on this "Stanford torus"-space station, which is itself apparently so small that you can see its curvature from a couple of feet off the ground - its scale when viewed from Earth would instead dictate that it be far larger, be visibly spinning, which it apparently isn't, and have a visible dark-to-light stratospheric barrier, which is nowhere in evidence. The people who live there can't just breathe direct space in the sunshine!
Stratospheres have consequences dictated by physics and engineering: they necessitate an- and aerobic engines, and impose different crash results for the "landing" shuttlecraft. And there is a second, equally preposterous "Biddleonian"-Firing-Squad-scene (shooting turrets arranged in a circle), in which the spacecraft's exploding shards neither burn up nor behave ballistically, because they're hitting the non-existent atmosphere.
So Blomkamp's space station fails to measure up to Stanley Kubrick's far more plausible 1968 effort in the classic 2001:A Space Odyssey. Never remind an audience of a classic and then suck by comparison. Elysium's irkingly ignorant "...Ehm... and then future science happens" attitude just can't draw audiences in anymore.
The other annoying plot device is the imposition of radiation poisoning on Matt Damon's Max. This choice is so badly jarring (too serious a sickness for so many physical challenges to overcome) that it's just impossible to accept the really dying character fighting baddies at all, let alone getting alternately better then worse, then better, better, better, then worse, and better again, whenever the plot required.
Clearly this wasn't just a problem of shooting scenes out of sequence. Max's implausible bouts of robust/ill-health and back again is just careening overcontrol by the plot, which needed him to frequently forget that he was mortally ill - all while undergoing the physical assault of that horrid, unhygienic, and implausible exoskeleton.
Worse, the two neglectful human perpetrators of Max's irradiation, the mercs-for-hire, as well as the pointlessly ruthless robotic "policemen", were all so poorly drawn (caricatured) that they degraded the film's tone during their scenes to that of a graphic novel . Yes, the very same graphic novel that Blomkamp used to pitch his story to the movie stars who signed on board. Unfortunately there is little human feeling in the story to uplift it all afterward.
Neill Blomkamp's first feature film, District 9(2009), had been full of organic and unforced pathos four years ago, emotionally recalling and paying silent homage to the far more earnest Enemy Mine(1986)). District eked out surprising amounts of empathy from its audience and totally captured our hearts. Blomkamp's second film simply does nothing of the sort.
So Elysium is commonly experienced as soulless.
Interestingly, perennial recent bad guy William Fichtner now seems to specialize in roles that are soon-to-be-"red- shirted" (Star Trek parlance), as he again undertakes here.
The third act's last-ditch effort to make Sharlto Copley's ruthless mercenary Kruger suddenly develop a psychic break (the plot just lost its mind here, too) just to turn him into a crazed Terminator type in fact totally loses the film any of its elevated themes. Themes such as its internalised debate about aggressive border protectionism. If anything, that should have been the thrust of this sci-fi plot, but it's lost in this morass of careening, hackneyed, and embarrassingly ignorant cartoonish set of action pieces.
There was utterly no reason or rhyme for Copley's Kruger to go "Terminator", so again, Elysium is reminding its audience of a classic, then sucking by comparison. If you introduce a sudden gross plot change without on screen explanation with character linkages, it will be necessarily perceived as careening. Rarely are a big budget feature's ostensibly shrouded graphic novel origins so embarrassingly on show.
In the end it's just glaringly obvious that Blomkamp's past collaborator, screenwriter Terri Tatchell, had too little input into his follow-up film (she only gets a Thank You credit), because this grinding screenplay eventually wears back down into a graphic novel without her: code for "boys only". Dear Terri, please come back....(5/10)