Sci-fi in the Star Trek tradition

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2015)

Elysium is really science nonfiction; a movie about Earth as it exists today, with futuristic settings and fight scenes to make it fun. (This is not my theory; Neill Blomkamp is on record about this. I believe the quotation is something like, "It's not the future, it's now.") The correspondence is pretty much one-to-one, with that clear global vision that a really fine South African filmmaker can bring to the party.
Somebody in the FAQs calls Elysium "leftwing propaganda". I didn't actually click on that post, but my guess is this person is an American. (Possibly a Canadian or British spear-bearer.) For the record, all Blomkamp does here is press the haves and have-nots together on one screen; the scenarios are current fact (again, with allowance for sci-fi analogy). The alleged "politics" of the film are the kind of politics you get when it's raining outside and someone says, "It's raining outside."
The performances are fabulous. Matt Damon is basically Will Hunting in a favela, Jodie Foster is icy as Dick Cheney in heels (and we get to hear her native-fluent French!), and Sharlto Copley is skin-crawlingly evil as the hatchet-man; somehow, the same Afrikaner accent that was so cute in District 9 is freakin' satanic here.
So see it. It's got all the things you loved about that other Blomkamp film. Apparently, we need more South African movies.