Superficially Stylish and Rich, There's Not Much of Substance Under Elysium's Skin

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2013)

Tackling the 1-percent crowd with the same kind of subtlety he showed third-world racial relations in District 9, young auteur Neill Blomkamp presents a narrow, but thoughtful, glimpse into the not-so-distant future. As with his first feature-length showing, Blomkamp's vision and attention to detail are instant hooks, but the director carelessly chooses to cut bait before reeling in his big catch. This film's knack for the little things is easily its most striking feature: the robust, believable appearance of the world's widespread future tech, a melting pot of different languages amongst the commoners, a photographer's eye when fitting the upper class's orbiting space station into shots of the horizon.
Those intricacies at play, plus the dead-simple premise, make the first hour a real joy to behold. It's when the plot tries to get up and go in the second act, sadly, that it falls apart at the seams. There's just nothing to it; an immodest collection of bad action movie gimmicks and one-dimensional characters, it seems to lose track of the core message at twenty paces. It's constantly contradictive and routinely under-explains key concepts, not for added dramatic tension, but because nobody seems to have thought that far ahead. The frequent fight scenes are a hand-held buffet, herking and jerking the screen right to the point of nausea and beyond. The list goes on. At the end of the day, even poor Matt Damon's redemptive character arc, a simple affair in which a selfish man finally makes a sacrifice to the betterment of his peers, is rendered pointless by a glaring, significant series of plot holes.
As a showcase of imagination, this is great stuff. It's the visual medium at its very best, a not-so-perfect postcard of a vivid, bustling future Earth that lives, breathes and kicks. As a sci-fi space drama, however, it's terribly, tragically flawed. Frankly, I couldn't wait for it to be over.