Elysium (2013) Review

3.5/5

This is an entertaining and often thrilling look at a bleak future for the world, complete with great acting and fantastic visuals. It also, however, has an agenda that requires a bit of conversation.
The visuals are arguably the best of the year, along with Pacific Rim. I'm a sucker for futuristic or CGI visuals implemented into a film over very rugged and real-looking settings. Add a handheld camera, and I'm sold. The director of this film helmed the previous Best Picture nominee District 9, and here, Neill Blomkamp uses the same visual panache to tell an even darker story. More on that in a minute. To sum it up, the visuals rock and keep you engaged the entire time.
Matt Damon is just the man for this film, as he successfully portrays a man driven by the will to live and alternately by the love of his life. His pain is palpable, his stress exudes tension, and we root for him from the opening frame. He has a working-man kind of humble sensibility about him that the audience wants to see succeed. Jodie Foster is great here as the brains behind the villainy, and Sharlto Copley is incredibly fierce as the brawn of the enemy. This is not the same Copley you will remember from District 9, and that fact makes him all the better of an actor.
This is a bleak, violent, and dark (sometimes darkly comical) look at what the United States will be in the year 2154. In a nutshell, it's not pretty. The privileged live on Elysium, a "habitat" above Earth, and the poor slubs who can't afford it live on Earth. It is an intriguing premise, but it also sets up a hole that it proved too ambitious to crawl out of. Aside from the lull in the second act, there is an issue here that prevented me from going higher than 3.5/5.
I appreciate a film with enough gall to stick with a political agenda so prevalent in today's world and integrate it into a story where it benefits from both the characters and the plot, as long as it is done subtly. Here, they just about paint their agenda onto a sledgehammer and pulverize your face with it. I was so invested in the story and the film itself, that I found myself a little turned off when I realized it was a device used to make me agree with their side. All politics aside, I don't believe that a film should do that.
Did it ruin the film? Not at all; on the contrary, you should seek it out as it's a hell of a good time. Enough of a good time to look past the agenda and just enjoy the film.