Movie review: Elysium

Matt Damon hooks up with underworld pals to get to Elysium.

Neill Blomkamp created his own impossibly hard act to follow with District 9.

The 2009 flick started off as consolation prize for Blomkamp's Peter Jackson-produced movie of the Halo game franchise failing to achieve lift-off.

It ended up with a vast profit, Oscar nominations and earned the young South African director an instant fanclub, many of whom will be lining up to see what's he's done here with a vastly bigger budget, bigger names and some big ideas about where a world of Haves and Have-nots might be headed in 140 or so years.

What he's done is quite a lot, Elysium is a sci-fi action flick that might lack the originality of its predecessor but still thrills in its own refreshing, satisfying way.

Sure, its allegory about economic imbalances might be shouty and clumsy. And it does jettison story logic to get us to a clunky typical big action movie finale that is quite a bit dumber than what has preceded it.

But it's still an often-spectacular, fairly riveting dystopian thriller. In the year 2154, the world's Haves are off on Elysium, a space station-as-gated-community where Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster, the cast's weak link) is in charge of ruthlessly keeping out the terrestrial huddled masses.

The Have-nots have made Third World mega-slums out of First World cities now run as police states by robo-cops. There, the likes of Max (Damon, solid as ever) are virtual slaves - well he is until a fatal dose of factory radiation gets him sent home to die with enough pills to keep him functioning for a few days.

Max's only hope of survival is to get to Elysium. That involves hooking up with his old underworld pals, and getting involved in a data heist - that's after he's given a strength-boosting exoskeleton to deal with the robocops and, worse, the big bad Kruger (Copley) who is Delacourt's truly heinous man on the ground.

Add in a nurse who's an old mate from the orphanage Max grew up in, her sick child, and Delacourt's attempt to reboot the orbiting utopia and you've got a real space opera.

Set it against Blomkamp's grand ultra-gritty vision of the future and you've got enough to keep his fanclub happy, for now.

Stars: 4/5
Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Rating: R16 (violence and offensive language)
Running time: 110 mins
Verdict: Not in the same league as District 9 but big fun.

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- TimeOut