Elysium is writer/director Neil Blomkamp’s second movie. That name alone meant I was going to see it. District 9 is arguably the best sci-fi movie released in the last decade, so I had high hopes for Blomkamp’s follow up. What I got was a good, but not great movie.

District 9 was a real breath of fresh air. It was really original, it came out of nowhere, had fantastic no name actors and looked insane for having a small ($30 million) budget. District 9 is just awesome. I can’t fault much of anything on a technical level for Elysium. Many of those high standards carried over from D9. In fact, Sharlto Copley is in this film and he’s done a huge character shift. In D9 he was the nobody turned reluctant hero through horrific circumstances. In Elysium he is a fantastic villain, the rabid merc Kruger, chasing down the hero Max (Matt Damon). Damon is great in this too, he’s proven he can pull off action the Bourne series and he makes for a likable hero.

Story wise, I found Elysium to be too predictable and heavy handed. In 130 years, Elysium is a space station that holds the incredibly wealthy. Earth is more or less dying out. Pollution is choking it out, the human population is way too high to be sustained by what’s left. Elysium is Eden, a floating utopia with amazing healthcare. It’s kinda silly how awesome it is. The people in charge of Elysium do all they can to keep the undesirables out. Back on Earth, Max gets seriously sick from work and has 5 days to get to Elysium for a cure.

Now my problems. You can see every step of where this movie goes before it happens. There’s not much finesse going on here. The message that all humans are equal is made early and made often. It wisely avoids going for a “us vs them” wealth inequality or immigration and focuses on healthcare. People don’t need to die in the streets for any reason when a solution is there. But the movie never let’s that sit and keeps reminding you every 20 minutes. Plus, the healthcare McGuffin Machine is a real Messiah like device. The thing can do anything with just a few sweeps of a laser. Lay down in this thing and it can heal anything as long as you aren’t brain dead or your heart is missing from your body. The movie shows us a world in 130 years that we’ve completely mastered our biology and it feels too sci-fi perfect because the machine is so simple. No matter what it is, blood disorders, genetic diseases, broken bones, body reconstruction, it just takes a wave of a wand to cure.

While I was hoping for more, I still liked Elysium quite a bit. Definitely one of the better movies released this summer, it stands as a really good sci-fi movie. The future tech is really well visualized, it looks and sounds great and the action is really striking. Held down by a capable cast, Elysium is a movie to see.