Elysium is a film set in a dystopian future in which the wealthy have abandon Earth. In 2154, Earth is overpopulated and polluted. Most of the Earth’s citizens live in complete poverty, with little food, technology and medical care.
Elysium, a place only for the rich. Earth, a place for the rest.
The rich and powerful people live in Elysium — a terraformed space habitat in orbit. Advanced technology includes Med-Bays — medical machines which can cure diseases, reverse the aging process and regenerate new body parts. A long-running feud exists between the wealthy Elysium citizens and the Earth citizens, who want Elysium technology to cure their medical ailments.
Great video effects but lacking human relationships and emotions.
Visually the film is quite stunning and it has some great cinematography when it comes to the larger shots. The CGI effects are excellent and blend in well with the environment. The Earth of the film looks very gritty, believable and lived-in while the space station Elysium has this very sterile and futuristic look to it. You could really buy it that Earth could look like this with many decades of neglect and poverty. Everything’s in disrepair and in decline. The rich on the other hand have every resource available to them in their own little paradise in space. The set and production designers truly did a great job with the locations.
Jodie Foster plays Delacourt, the homeland-security chief tasked with keeping out illegal immigrants from Earth. On Earth, Matt Damon plays Max, the ordinary poverty-stricken guy who once promised his childhood sweetheart Frey that he would take her to the promised land of Elysium. Through a desperate plunge into violent crime, he might yet make good on that promise. The rest of the characters in the movie can be described more as “fodder” so there is no point of mentioning them.
Many people have criticised the movie for lacking substance the plot and the characters not being that interesting and hard to get, emotionally invested and also overplaying the class “card” which was used in Neill Blomkamp’s previous movie, “District 9“. All in all it was an enjoyable movie.