Saw it last week. Like Magnus said it has great visuals but in the end it's all very average. Damon is quite good though Foster and Copley are average at best.

I want to slightly amend my comment. Second best after The Lone Ranger.

Man, this is bad. Like may end up my worst of the year bad. Calling it soulless, flat dystopia porn is generous. Stock characters, stock plot. Even the thug extras stand out as uninspired.

The film has bigger problems, but Jodie's performance is like drunk Mel Gibson coached her on set. Reminded me of Thandie Netwon in W. where it's a spiraling, epic disaster that comes only once every few years.

A futuristic action thriller has been done enough times, that Elysium could be original in two ways. Either its plot or premise could find a way to stand out, or its execution. Unfortunately in both areas Elysium is as generic as it gets.

Elysium’s plot is out of the how-to dystopia playbook. Matt Damon’s Max lives in a brutal futuristic setting, gets to make a stand against the rich bad guys and along the ways saves a pretty love interest with a sick daughter. Yada yada.

What really kills the film is the execution of these ideas. Elysium’s characters and emotion is as flat as it gets. Whether it’s due to lack of character development, poor dialog or dreary seriousness, Elysium is full of generic stock characters there to push the plot and action scenes and not a lot else. Jodie Foster’s Delacourt is especially disappointing as a standard politician bad guy, Foster attempting a twitchy, accented performance that only makes her character less believable. Sharlto Copley has the right idea by making his villain Kruger fun by hamming it up, but his evil outbursts are so over the top that it feels like a performance, not a character.

The film may have worked if its action scenes or dialog were memorable enough to put up with the generic plot and characters, but alas, it’s as boring in those areas too. The action scenes largely amount to cheap grade action dystopia porn. The dialog is over-serious exposition that only serves to make a gray film even more dreary and dull.

Elysium is a film devoid of life in the characters, story, action scenes, or dialog. It’s a disastrously terrible film that will be one of my, if not worst film of 2013 when looking back on this year.

Didn't you love Cosmopolis?

Elysium

Disappointing, to say the least. The political message in this movie, while they think is cutting edge and relevant, is just old and been-done-before. The story is unoriginal and bland. The filming is frenetic and unsteady. And the film is riddled with tons of mistakes/plot holes/nonsensical ideas.

I really wanted to enjoy Elysium too. Let me get this out there, though, this was not Matt Damon's fault. The blame entirely falls in the lap of Mr. Neill Blomkamp. While some of the action scenes were cool, the character of Kruger was very good (played magnificently by Sharlto Copley), Jodie Foster gets stabbed in the neck (a brave narrative choice), and there were some cool guns and futuristic ideas (like the healing bed), the film was largely forgettable. It didn't engage or even set the scene. It was a rushed introduction to a world that I knew nothing about, and then when things started happening, I couldn't see it anyway because of the stupid shaky-cam. I lost interest. Well, actually, the film never gave me an opportunity to get interested.

I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and put the general awfulness of the movie down to the Chinese censoring board. Oh, didn't I mention that? Yes, it was cut up like a bitch.

C-

obamacare: the movie

More like quipster.

What a mess.

Why do have a banner year for sci-fi and get gems like After Earth, Pacific Rim and now this, which can you believe it, is worse than the other two.

At least the former two had a narrative, even if generic and overused.

This was all over the place. Characters that can only be described as random, or worse, only existing as deux es machina plot devices, and not once, but repetitiously and for different incongruous reasons.

Just absolutely mediocre and slapdash. Astounding how this cost $90m more than District 9.

Let's hope Blomkamp's next movie Chappie makes us forget the disappointing tedium of Elysium.

Finally watched this. I really enjoyed District 9, but it's not exactly one of those films I'm clamoring to ever see again. With that in mind, I thought this was pretty terrible. I think it's biggest problem is it takes its interesting premise and visuals and squanders them in the always boring cliche subplots and stereotype characters. I don't even understand the Sharlto Copley love. I found him annoying but at least played the character well in District 9. Here he might be one of the worst villains I've seen in quite sometime like this is Raul Julia in Street Fighter bad (But Julia at least had the credibility to ham it up). He's boring, so un menacing, and half the time completely not understandable at all. His stupid take over with 2 other guys at the end was completely laughable. Foster is given even less to do, except to try out a really awkward accent. Damon fares better and his story is the most interesting and enjoyable, but the addition of the desperate single mom with dying child dragged everything down. The ending is grabbing for emotion at the end and it just kind of falls flat with flashbacks and VO that you'd think it was a bad DTV film.

D

Come on, that's how all villains should be!