Elysium is an entertaining, thought provoking sci-fi/action flick with superb special effects. It's also one of those films that is enjoyable while you're watching it, but the moment you begin thinking about it, the holes in story logic become big, head scratching issues.
Elysium depicts Earth in 2154 as a planet that has collapsed under its own population, with the entire city of Los Angeles looking like the squalor of current cardboard/tent cities in India or South Africa.
The wealthy have all left the planet and live in the orbiting space station Elysium. The entire space station looks like Beverly Hills, with massive mansions, pools and perfect greenery. Even better, each home has a scanning device that you lie down in that fixes any pending health issues in less than a minute, with one pass of it's scanner.
Matt Damon stars as Max, a worker on Earth that has tussled with the law and lives by himself in a one room slum, while holding down a steady factory job.
After Max is radiated in a work accident and finds he has less than a week to live, it becomes his mission to get to Elysium and cure himself. That personal mission soon expands into a much bigger quest to bring balance to the have-nots on Earth and the super wealthy circling overhead.
Jodie Foster stars as Delacourt, a power hungry security chief at Elysium who repels any attempt to breach the boundaries of the station with quick and deadly justice.
She soon employs her unpopular henchman Kruger (Sharlto Copley) to keep Max and his team from completing their mission.
Damon and Copley are both very convincing as violent, brutal men with opposite missions but equal strength and devotion. Their fight scenes are very well done, exciting and incredibly violent.
So here's the good news: The special effects, production design and sound design are all terrific. Some of the sound effects during the battles and chases in Dolby 7.1 are superb and room shaking, really immersing you in the action and the world of Elysium.
But here's the rub: the gaps in logic that creep in after the roller coaster ride are pretty daunting.
For example, how do the shuttles enter the atmosphere in Elysium? The stunning landscapes, lawns, swimming pools and perfect blue skies of the space station are beautiful to look at, but how does the station hold the atmosphere in? How do the shuttles simply approach and land/crash onto the shuttle surface? As depicted accurately in "Gravity", there is no sound, no air in space, yet apparently here, you just revolve a space station and you get Scottsdale in space without a wave in a swimming pool and plenty of air.
If every space shuttle that tries to approach illegally gets shot down, where does this never ending supply of million dollar shuttles come from?
How does Max's shuttle get past the defenses?
and most importantly: SPOILER ALERT: At the film's conclusion, wouldn't the pods now being available to every citizen on Earth cause much longer life spans and exponentially increase the world's overpopulation and food shortages?
END SPOILER ALERT.
The messages, preaching on illegal aliens, the one percent and communism/Marxism are pretty heavy handed, but if you can leave your brain at the door (as I did until afterward) and just watch as a sci-fi/action film, Elysium rocks. It's only afterward that the story collapses under it's own weight. We'll give it a B-.
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