Elysium (2013)

ELYSIUM  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Neill Blomkamp
    Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley,
    Alice Braga, Wagner Moura, Diego Luna,
    William Fichtner, Emma Tremblay
The first thing you see is a vast urban landscape in an advanced state of decay. And the first thing you think is, this looks like a sequel to "District 9". Which, in some ways, it is. It's by the same director, Neill Blomkamp, and it has a similar desiccated grittiness, an apocalyptic vision of a society and its machinery going to ruin. That hellish landscape is earth, and in the year 2154, that's where most of humanity lives. For the elite and the privileged, there's Elysium, a gleaming, pristine habitat on an orbiting space station, far removed from the teeming squalor below. One of the discarded millions down on the surface is an ex-con named Max (Matt Damon), a car-thief-turned-factory-worker who gets a massive dose of radiation on the job and learns he's got five days to live. One thing can save him: the advanced medical technology that only exists on Elysium. Where the subtext in "District 9" was apartheid, in "Elysium" it's immigration. The desperate inhabitants of earth will risk everything to get to a place that for them is literally heaven, boarding rattle-trap shuttles the Elysian defense forces routinely blow out of the sky. It's an action movie that dares to be about something besides monster robots and high-powered weaponry and violent men trying to beat each other to death. (It's about those things, too, of course.) The conclusion seems a little perfunctory, but Sharlto Copley (of "District 9") makes a wicked villain, and Jodie Foster, biting out orders in an accent all her own, has a good time as Elysium's ruthless defense minister, a protective mother who won't bat an eye over dealing with thugs, or plotting a coup, or orchestrating mass murder. It's not much of a part in some ways, but Foster takes what's there and runs with it. Mere earthlings had better stay out of her way.