No substance beneath all its glitter

Rating: 5/10 (3 December 2013)

In 2154, the population is divided in two social classes: the wealthy people live in Elysium, a space station with all the resources; the poor people lives in the exhausted Earth. In Los Angeles, the former car thief Max da Costa (Matt Damon) is on parole and works on an unhealthy factory Armadyne managed by the CEO John Carlyle (William Fichtner). He dreams on saving money to travel to Elysium. Meanwhile the Secretary of Defense of Elysium, Delacourt(Jodie Foster), plots a coup-of-stat against President Patel (Faran Tahir), with the support of Carlyle. He programs a software that can override Elysium's data system and make any change, including the president's name to Delacourt. Carlyle uploads the software to his brain to increase its protection. Max is exposed to a lethal amount of radiation in Armadyne and has only five more days of life. He seeks out the criminal Spider (Wagner Moura) expecting to travel to Elysium, where he can use a medical chamber called Med-bay that is capable to heal any disease and save his life. Spider tells that if Max steals profitable information, such as bank accounts, from the brain of Carlyle that is on Earth. Max accepts the proposal without knowing the powerful knowledge in Carlyle's brain. When Delacourt learns that the information she needs to become president was stolen from Carlyle brain, she sends the notorious agent Kruger to hunt down Max and recover the software at any cost.
Neill Blomkamp's Elysium is absolutely fantastic to look at, but it has no substance beneath all its glitter. It creates a believable future for the residents of Earth, yet Elysium doesn't look 'lived in' and the tale that's told isn't very compelling either. No matter how noble the intentions are to implement a class allegory into the sci-fi world, this was just hamfisted all around. Not once during the film did I really feel connected to the characters, story, or action. The script was way too-heavy handed in it's themes, while the characters were all woefully under-developed. The supposedly dangerous infiltration into the world's safest entity, Elysium, which has its own robot army, was breached so successfully without any defense measures when the protagonist wanted to. This is the kind of superficiality that hinders most sci-fi movies. In principle, this is the kind of movie I usually root for, but Elysium has mediocre acting, awful dialogues and one-dimensional characters along with a far-flung and completely illogical (within its own conventions) third act for me to support it. I like District 9, but don't worship it like its superfans, but this is miles apart from that movie. The only way to enjoy it is to turn your brains off and even that may not help its cause too much. Ideas don't make the movie, execution does.
5/10