Interesting sci-fi B movie

Rating: 6/10 (22 November 2013)

Elysium is a cyborg movie taking place some 150 years in the future, at a time when the entire earth is a sweatshop planet, while the upper class resides in an ultra lux space station in orbit. Guess what - technology has been used to chain down the 99%, but then an accident that Damon suffers sets off events that threaten to change the course of history.
The story is actually *kinda* original, in the same way that District 9 was. There are too many similarities between the 2 movies, and I bet that you'll like this one as much as you liked the other. It's clearly a b-movie despite all the money spent on cast (unlike district 9) and SFX (which were quite good). In fact if the director had not used any famous actors, I dare say it would be so much better.
If you haven't seen district 9, then let me sum it all up in bullets:
*Pros: a poor excuse of a plot, bad acting (partly due to the script)
*Cons: really good setting, nice photography, good SFX
*a lot of hand-held camera work
*average action sequences
*about the political commentary: Elysium is an overtly anti- capitalist/anti-imperialist screamer, not in the classic Hollywood sense of good vs evil - it's not the antithesis between rich evil bastards and poor good people; as the writer highlights from start to finish, the cause of unhappiness is clearly to be found in the system itself. Really huge (full with blinking neon arrows) parallels are drawn with modern day exploitation of the third world by the west, of the worker and nature by the capital, and so on, and so on. The message is so blatantly thrown in the face of the viewer that many people are genuinely put off by it for purely ideological reasons. The same allusions were evident in district 9, but people took that film more like it was about racism, which is more universally accepted as a bad thing.
*overall: slightly above average flick