Welcome to the world of Elysium: Heaven, if you're rich, and hell on earth if you're poor. Elysium is a great thinking man Sci-fiction movie.

Rating: 7/10 (18 August 2013)

From the director of 2009's Distant 9 Neil Blomkamp, comes another controversial sci-fi movie about the different between the have and have not, racism, and overpopulation. The movie is so like Distant 9, it's like watching the future Earth after the aliens left it. It's pretty shocking to see Neil Blomkamp try to strike lightning again with similar plots and themes. It's rare to see a hard Rated R blockbuster nowadays. I give props to them about that. The movie is a thinking man movie because it explores the political and sociological themes such as immigration, health care and class issues. Great world building indeed, as the film takes place in 2154, on both a luxurious space station known as Elysium where the rich people have orbit and ravaged, disease, wasteland Earth with the overpopulation poor. Elysium's Earth, so remind me of Distant 9 with its vast emptiness. Elysium's space station reminds me of an old 1970's NASA Ames drawings of a ring-shaped Torus space station. Those paintings were in a lot of Sci-Fi books and comics at the time and the 1980's. The space station also look like something that came from 1968's Kubrick, 'A Space Odyssey' or Larry Niven's Ringworld novel. The visual effects are amazing. Great use of CGI. The world on display here is imaginative yet utterly convincing. Max DeCosta (Matt Damon), an ex-con lives in this world, manufacturing the means of his own oppression, making security bots. It's weird that he is one of the few white people on Earth. Only when he got into deadly radiation poisoning, he joins the cause of getting people to Elysium so that they can have a chance to survive. I would kinda like to see that he was loyal to that cause beforehand. He is not alone, as he is join by his childhood best friend, Fey (Alice Braga) who daughter has leukemia. Don't get me wrong, free health care to sick dying children is fine, but with a world that is that overpopulation; the hard truth is that depopulation is needed to solve that problem. Overpopulation can destroy a habitat and nature eco-cycle if not watch. In truth, while Max DeCosta and his crew are portray as free-fighters, they are also terrorists to those people who control Elysium, mostly John Carlyle (William Fichtner) and Jessica Delacourt (Jodie Foster). While, William Fichtner is clearly acting as William Fichtner; Jodie Foster's acting was pretty bad. She had this weird accent that supposed to be South African as if she was playing Lillian Crane. I don't understand why everybody in Elysium was portray as evil business-men. While, I'm more liberal, I would think at less, the movie would have shown that some people at Elysium would be more against the anti-immigration. Why couldn't Elysium build another space station or terra- form another planet or even get this, rebuild Earth? Clearly, they had the technology for it. I forgot, because the plot says so. At less, they could have done is add a few medical pods on Earth for young dying children so they would be so many civil unrest. So Max makes a deal with a local crime lord: He will kidnap John Carlyle in order to download information held in his brain, and in return he'll get a ticket on the next illicit flight to Elysium. To help with the gig, Max even has a powerful exo-skeleton grafted painfully onto his body. This makes the movie, seem more like a video game like Bio Shock Infinite. The movie is full of annoying action scenes with slow bullet time moments and shaking cam. It was a headache to watch. The action fight scenes were so fast, it was blurry. At less, Mad Max had himself, a pretty intense psycho villain mercenary named Kruger. (Sharlto Copley). Wow, this actor is amazing, too bad, he isn't in many films. It's polar opposite of the character, he played in Distant 9. The movie's plot can be a big predictable. The Jesus symbolism was tired when other movies did it, and manages to feel even more derivative in this film's overt delivery. An handful of right-wing news outlets attacked the film for being sci-fi socialism, but in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with open discussion to these issues. I agree the film should be designed to make us think, rather than stuff a predigested agenda down our throats, but sometimes that push is needed for this society. Much of what Republican analysts mistakenly see as Occupy Wall Street support is merely a form of "mass-ploitation" — Hollywood seizing on angles that appeal to the widest possible audience. There been films like this since the dawn of cinema. Remember, films like 1927's Metropolis. I think, most people would agree with that people should have access to first-rate healthcare and a better standard of living. They just disagree on the means of providing that. The themes of the movie are brilliant, even the title 'Elysium' was a term in ancient times given to a place, like Heaven that was reserved by gods for the favored heroes. We have other literary examples of this through Richard Matheson, Isaac Asimov, and Philip Dick, to name a few. The movie also have this 1979's Mad Max feel to it. The soundtrack was a bit too loud. It remind me of a copycat of 2010's Inception sound, rather than the moving music instrument that should follow a film like this. That being the case, Elysium is just not the satisfying film it should be to some people, but to me: it work. It was fun to watch. Elysium works in a way, how Elysium in the film works. It's just there to remind people to seek a better life. I could find escape from the harshest of my reality in the film 'Elysium'.