Dick Cheney's Ringworld

Rating: 1/10 (19 September 2013)

Writer/director Blomkamp's breakthrough work was 'District 9' - a simple plot driven by fairly original concepts and techniques - and it was a big success. Predictably the new 'wunderkind' was given a bloated budget for his follow-up project - and it's resulted in a major letdown with a trite story undermined by implausible ideas. The film is set about 150 years in the future, with mankind living on a polluted, over-populated earth, and being exploited by a fascist elite who control the masses by means of a robot police force. The privileged minority reside on Elysium, a vast orbiting space station which resembles a luxurious Beverly Hills gated community. One of the earthbound serfs is the standard action-movie hero: a tough-but-sensitive ex-con called Max. After being exposed to a fatal dose of radiation at his robot-factory workplace, he needs to access the forbidden medical facilities on Elysium - and during his struggles to save himself, Max becomes entangled in a 'coup d'etat' planned by the station's megalomaniac female head of security.
Although the film looks good, Blomkamp provides little reason to care about anybody, since the participants act like manic puppets with incomprehensible motivations. He attempts to conceal the yawning gaps in his story by getting the characters to shout at one another, and engage in endless shoot-outs with CGI robots - all of which produces little more than brain-addling tedium.