Looks nice, but has too many problems.

Rating: 5/10 (5 February 2014)

With a cast of Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley and Wagner Moura, directed by Neill Blomkamp, with a huge budget - what can go wrong? Apparently, a lot.
ELYSIUM is like OBLIVION (2013) (the sci-fi-disaster starring Cruise). It is visually really neat, cast and budget is as good as it gets and directors are considered some of the best right now.
But both have major problems. I won't go into Oblivion - that's a different story.
Elysium starts out with great visuals, which is its strength. It then goes on to try to describe the main character Max (Damon), but fails to deliver something interesting. It's a misch-masch of boring scenes where nothing really happens.
Introduction to other (major) characters, as Spider (Moura) is sloppy. Foster gets a lot of screen time, but her direction was obviously not great. Feels like she's reading cue-cards. She looks and feels extremely uncomfortable until her death scene - which seems to be a relief of finally being written out of this mess. That's also her best performance in this film, maybe just because of that.
Best of the actors, however, is the too little used character Frey, played by the excellent Alice Braga. She doesn't seem to have anything to prove, and because of this, she makes a small and pretty insignificant character believable and good.
Worst if the character Spider (though the always good Moura does what he can with the badly written part), who is presented as a bad-guy in the beginning, but turns good in the end - for no particular reason at all.
But it is the script that makes this a bland and uninteresting film. It simply doesn't make sense.
Yes - SPOILERS ahead: If the "med bays" was so important to the story - why not introduce them a bit better and earlier? And why didn't we see that this is the reason why Elysium is fighting against the Earth population? As it is presented now, there seem to be an enormous amount of med-bays - and if that is the case, why not give the Earth population access to them (as they do in the end, which doesn't affect Elysium at all, by the way) and in one blow remove the will and reason for the Earth population to try to gain access to Elysium. Now sure, there are other reasons to go to Elysium, but the Elysium powers-at-be, would have a stronger power over the Planet's population.
All this is never addressed, and it's the main flaw in the whole script. Worse is: the whole story hangs on it. Which actually makes the whole movie completely illogical and totally useless. What's the point, really? I still give this movie a 5 out of 10. It deserves some points for visuals, cast and for some interesting scenes. I like the locations (most, except those that look like taken from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), props, costumes and vehicles.
Music is bland, gore and violence is extremely uneven (very gory at a few points, and nothing at most other instances), script is terrible and direction is lacking.
It's disappointing to see such a promising director as Bloomkamp not being successful here. I can only assume it has something to do with the high budget. With this high budget, the producers and investors get way too much power - both over storyline as over final edit. Maybe Bloomkamp can, in the future, go back and re-edit something better out of this. It kind of deserves it.