Elysium

Directed by Neill Blomkamp

(R)

***

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“At last, a good big film,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Set in a future when Earth is a dusty ruin and the rich live in comfort in a hovering space station, this science-fiction thriller feels “angry and alive” compared with other summer action extravaganzas because its director immerses the audience in a plausible alternative world and seems to truly care about his hero’s mission. Matt Damon plays a factory worker who has just days to live when he takes on a kidnapping mission, and he “comes off credibly as a ticking time bomb,” said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. But once this would-be hero is surgically melded with a machine-like exoskeleton, he loses much of his human appeal. Soon the film devolves into a series of standard gun battles and explosions, ending in “mawkish sentimentality.” You can fault the movie for turning conventional, but “as entertainment it rarely falters,” said Scott Foundas in Variety. Young director Neill Blomkamp (District 9) proves once again to be “a superb storyteller” with “a master’s sense of pacing” and “an architect’s eye” for detail.