Elysium has the feel of two movies awkwardly spliced into one. It sort of tells the story of two different worlds but there isn't that usual complexity that would make a film like this engrossing. The film is full of interesting ideas and questions about how to survive in a futuristic place like this and yet, there isn't enough time to cover it all.

Character motivations become either simplistic (as is the case with Matt Damon's Max character or Alice Braga's Frey character) or completely inexplicable (Jodie Foster's Secretary Delacourt). It could have been better. Judging by the pedigree of writer/director Neill Blomkamp, it had the potential to be another sterling entry in the science fiction genre. The execution just wasn't there.

The most recognizable part of this film is how the future world is laid out. The super rich part of humanity gets to live above the Earth in a Stanford torus called "Elysium." The world of Elysium has perfect weather conditions and each house on the torus contains a specialized "med bay", where the ability exists to heal any and all forms of illness and injury. It's a place only for the elite. The rest of humanity lives down on Earth, which has become overcrowded, poor, and polluted in the mid-22nd century.

The film focuses on Max De Costa, a former car thief living in Los Angeles.  He lives a normal life by and large, working every day at a machine factory and trying to re-connect with his childhood friend Frey. One day, he gets into an accident that leaves him with a limited time to live. His only chance is to somehow get some form of transport to Elysium and onto a med bay so that it can heal him of his sickness.



Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Delacourt wants to initiate a coup to oust the current President on Elysium. She uses anyone and everyone to do so, including a psychopathic rogue military agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley) and the CEO of the machine factory Max just happens to work in (William Fichtner).

The primary thing that piqued my curiosity with this film was how the characters were able to survive in this futuristic world. It's shades of Blade Runner and Minority Report in that Earth of the future has become brutal and unyielding, treating those on Earth almost like criminals who don't deserve to live. Max is doing the best he can, which is limited considering he's on parole from a previous life of stealing cars. The machine factory job isn't particularly fulfilling but it becomes the impetus for the overall plot that takes over the second half of the film.



That's really it. Max uses his criminal contacts underground to try to secure a ticket to Elysium in order to prevent his impending death. Getting to Elysium is a very difficult prospect. A nice sequence at the start of the film shows why. A trio of shuttles carrying illegal immigrants from Earth try to force their way onto Elysium. Two get shot down immediately by missiles. The remaining shuttle lands with one woman managing to cure her daughter using a med bay before getting deported immediately. This seems to be Blomkamp's allegory on the immigration policies of many current countries, including the United States.

He could have totally run with this, but seemed more concerned with brewing a half-baked subplot involving the Secretary of Defense's initiation of a secret coup of the President. Quite simply, Jodie Foster is terrible in this film. For a villain, Delacourt doesn't have much bite. Foster plays Delacourt very oddly, with a clipped accent that is some garbled combination of French and British. Delacourt has a vocabulary and speech pattern that seems to be as if from another film altogether.



Her entire scheme is dependent on information stored in the brain of another person, with the idea that they can get into Elysium covertly enough to reset the whole place and take over the government. Frankly, the coup is not all that interesting because Blomkamp doesn't take the time to explain the reasons why Delacourt would want to initiate this coup. The President has done nothing to indicate he needs to be booted out of office so the plot ends up not having much substance to it. So both plots with Delacourt and Max collide eventually as he makes his way to Elysium.

A tender love story between Max and Frey sort of develops, then doesn't, as the priority becomes getting her sick daughter into one of the med bays on Elysium. While all of this is going on, the psychotic Kruger is always on the hunt for something to kill. Kruger isn't a much better villain than Delacourt. His one goal is to cause as much chaos and danger without so much as any sort of different preoccupation. The result of which becomes a video game-like hunt by Kruger through the bowels of the Elysium federal facility to kill Max. It does satisfy the action quotient for the film, but the sequences look very similar to each other with the only difference being that one takes place on Earth and the other takes place on Elysium.

The film is a mess, albeit a good-looking mess. It's good to see original science fiction fare on the big screen, but this could have been, rather should have been, better. The world of Elysium deserves more exploration than what was put forth here.