Elysium review (By: David Li)
Movie Review: Elysium (2013) action, drama
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Stars: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
Elysium is set in the year 2154. The very wealthy live on a man-made space station called Elysium (an outer space gated community) while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth.
Jodie Foster is Delacourt, the homeland-security chief tasked with keeping out the wetbacks – illegal immigrants from Earth showing up in their ramshackle spacecraft.
Max – played by Matt Damon – is one of the poor on Earth. He first plays an impoverished little boy telling his little girlfriend Frey that he’ll get them both to Elysium one day, “I promise,” he says to her. When we next see Max, he’s a shaven-headed, heavily tattooed ex-con, scratching a living. After a gruesome industrial accident, Matt’s only chance is to get up to Elysium pronto, taking Frey and her leukemia-stricken little daughter with him — for among the unfair advantages up there, is access to magic scanning machines that instantly restore full health as long as a person can prove that they’re a citizen of Elysium.
So with his life hanging in the balance, he reluctantly takes on a dangerous mission with a rebel group. They bolt a sub-Terminator style robotic exoskeleton onto his body and insert a digital portal into his brain through a disgustingly mucky and amateur operation. But Elysium’s dirty-ops guy, Kruger, played by the marvelous Sharlto Copley, is soon commissioned by Delacourt to hunt down Max. Max and Kruger battle away superhumanly – the last third of the film portraying (for the most part) the entire grusome clobbering. If Max succeeds, he could save not only his own life, but millions of people on Earth as well once he gets up to Elysium. Max is the only man with the chance to bring equality to the two worlds. Watch Elysium to find out if Max managed to complete his mission successfully.