Flixified: Elysium Film Synopsis, Review, Posters, Parental Guidance Information, Trailer (BONUS: 2 Elysium Special Features)

Profanity: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Violence:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Sex: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Summary

I really liked Elysium and the people I went to go see it with had mutual feelings towards it.

Let me first set the stage. Elysium is a giant spinning space wheel that floats above earth in the year 2145. The people who live there are wealthy, they can live virtually forever, and they have unlimited healthcare, riches, whatever they want. The people who live on Earth however, are extremely poor, the planet is over crowded, and the language of LA is Spanish (I don't know why I said that).

The main character, Max DiCosta, is an orphan who lives in a catholic orphanage in downtown LA (not when he's an adult, just when he's a kid) with his crush, a spanish girl named Frey. He's a street con who steels little things. That's what passes as a date in Max and Frey's life, I guess :). Max (like everyone else) wants to go to Elysium but (also like everyone else), he can't get a ticket.

Max works at a robot maintenance plant (I personally, wouldn't fix my abusers if I were Max. Robots beat people up in LA all the time in Elysium) where he....... Oh never mind, you know what they do at a robot maintenance plant!

Max has this friend named Julio who must have quit the movie or something because he dies like 5 minutes in. Julio is a thief and Max is an ex-thief so it would have been love at first sight. Why wasn't it? Oh, right, for one, Max isn't gay, and for two, he's already going out with Frey.

Meanwhile, some really cool criminal named Spider is trying to send people to Elysium. However, as the ships go up, the dull and uninteresting character (SPOILER (think of the implications)), Security Secretary Delacourt has her agent on Earth who's name is Kruger blow them out of the sky. Why she did that and didn't just use some epic space missiles that were on Elysium, I don't know.
Max gets locked in a radiation chamber by accident and is told by a robotic radiation droid that he has 5 days to live. He decides to go beg Mr. Spider to give him a ticket to Elysium. Spider, who, like most of the characters in this movie, is an asshole, refuses. However, and here's the big HOWEVER....... Oh wait, wrong saying. But, and here's the big BUT (got it right that time), Spider will send him to Elysium if he steals some sensitive information from the head of an Elysium citizen. Max, being pissed off at his ex-boss John Carlyle, says he'll do it as long as it's John Carlyle who they steal from.
Just a quick shout out. Only watch this movie if you want the GMC logo to be permanently plastered to the inside of your brain!
Max gets a shiny exosuit because his head hurts (thats all I need to do to get a free shiny super suit), and they go in their old, beat up GMC (view shout out above) and go to where they will get Carlyle's magical thoughts. For some reason, Carlyle puts a safeguard on his thoughts to make it so that, if anybody wants to use the thoughts, the person who's brain they are in will die. Pretty stupid as he expected it to be him who would use the thoughts.
Carlyle gets in his fancy Earth-Elysium spaceship (mommy, I want one. It's so shiny!!!) and promptly gets shot down into an empty field by Max and his friends who drive their GMC (oh no, now I'm accidentally doing product placement for them too!!) to where he crashed.
A very unrealistic battle ensues in which 4 guys beat up two special and super strong robots. In real life, that wouldn't be possible. However (but), this isn't real life.
Whoa. I forgot to tell you a key plot point (listen up, there aren't that many). Delacourt (Jodie Foster) wants to be president of Elysium and the thoughts that Carlyle protected by the deadly safety valve was a set of password to (in Spider's words) "Override their whole system" and put Delacourt in charge. In exchange, Carlyle gets funding to build 2 more Elysiums.
So, in order to stop Max from stealing Carlyle's thoughts, Delacourt enlists Kruger to stop Max from stealing the thoughts. TOO LATE!!! Max steals the thoughts from Carlyle and runs away. Kruger's new job is to find him. Everyone except for Kruger's men and Max were killed in the fight with the robots and Kruger. Kruger also stabbed Max in the chest so Max is hurt (duh).
Max makes his way to a hospital where Frey works. She tries to get him to go to the hospital, but, as when you have a stabbed chest it is completely unreasonable to go into a hospital, he refuses and she brings him to her house where her dying, Leukemia diseased daughter is sleeping. Frey fixes him up and sees a tattoo of her name on his lower side. Why she was looking at his thigh, I don't know as his cut was in the center of his stomach.
Max goes to see Spider after he gets better, and Spider takes one look at the scrambled code in Max's head and understands it completely. He says some overly dramatic words like: "They will hunt you to the edge of the earth for this", "Whoever has this has the power to override their whole system" and a bunch of other BS like that.
However, even though he can "Save everybody", he is a selfish asshole so he decides to not wait for Spider to unscramble the code and goes to get a free ride to Elysium from Kruger.
Meanwhile, Kruger breaks in to Frey's house and kidnaps her and her daughter.
Max finds a destroyed drone and fixes the camera on it. The feed automatically goes to Kruger's ship. Max points to his head and shows Kruger where he is (you'd think they might have a bit more advanced ways of tracking their drones.)
Max somehow found a grenade (WTF???) and, when Kruger lands his ship near him threatens to blow his own head off if Kruger doesn't bring him to Elysium and fix him right away. Oh, big scary threat. I wish my enemies threatened me like that. If you don't do what I want, I'll destroy Rotten Tomatoes. Kruger agrees. Max gets on the ship with Frey, her daughter, and Kruger's men.
They all get along fine until they're already flying over Elysium. Kruger is playing with Max's toy :( (Well, more like his girlfriend) and so Max blows Kruger's head off. Oh yea, really the default action. He flirts with your girlfriend so you chuck a grenade at his head.
What ensues for the rest of the movie is an incredibly epic and never ending battle. Kruger's men are able to reconstruct his face so he ends up surviving. He then stabs Delacourt in the neck because she was yelling at him(he and Max should hang out, they really have something for random acts of violence in bouts of temper) and chucks the dying Delacourt and Frey and her daughter into a locked room. However, despite the fact that Kruger survived having his face blown off, Delacourt dies in about 3 seconds and 45 minutes from the end of the movie. I guess Jodie Foster decided she'd had enough of this movie so they rushed her death.
The rest of the movie is an epic battle (wait, already said that) between Elysium soldiers (mostly Kruger's guys who have now taken over Elysium) and Spiders guys including Max (Yea, Spider came up to Elysium when nobody was looking). Max ends up throwing Kruger over a cliff and down onto some kind of pipe (he dies).
In this time, Max has also succeeded in freeing Frey and her daughter and sending them, with one of Spider's guys, to a "med bay"which can fix her (the daughter's) disease.
Max and Spider go to Elysium's main control chamber and implement the code that can make everybody a citizen of Elysium (the stuff thats in Max's head.)
But remember how Carlyle (Wow, it's been a while since we heard his name) had a safety valve on his thoughts that made it so the person with them would have to die in order for somebody to use them? Well, now Max is faced with a choice: He can save his own skin (and probably get killed anyway) or he can let himself die (and "Save Everyone"). (You know, nix the parenthesis but the rest of that sentence could have been the synopsis on IMDb.) Given his track record, you'd think he'd pick the former but he doesn't. He allows himself to be killed to save the world.
Then, EMS ships land on earth with tons of med bays to cure everyone on earth and there is a happy ending (expect for the fact that all major characters are dead!)

Review

Like I said above, I loved Elysium. I thought it was funny at parts (see the theatrical trailer) and had a lot of cool technology. My first thought when the credits started rolling was "Wow, good movie" which is not a reaction I had towards WW Z or RIPD (the two other movies I've seen lately). It [Elyium] was one of those long movies that feels short because it was so good.

However, even though I enjoyed the story, the characters were bland. Delacourt was, as she seemed in the trailer, just another bad guy. Max was selfish, and Spider wouldn't give Max a ticket to Elysium without payment but expected Max to hang around and let himself die to help everyone else.

I thought the visual effects were great. Tons of cool explosions! They also did a really good job on the Elysium-Earth ships (especially the ugly ones. The fancy ones were boring.) Blomkamp really showed how horrible life on earth was very vividly. I would much rather live on Elysium.

Like most movies, Blomkamps second blockbuster was a little bit devoid of spirit. Not complaining though. It was much better than most movies that come out lately even though Delacourt was a total waste of Foster's talent.

Posters

Parental Guidance Information

Elysium should not be watched by anyone not yet in their teens or anyone (for that matter) who is immature when it comes to repeating language they hear on tv/on screen. Elysium is (in my opinion) rated R mostly for language even though there are some very gruesome scenes. There is a lot of use of the words "Fuck", "Shit", and "Bitch." although not nearly as much as, say, Contraband. You cannot stop your kids from hearing swears if you take them to Elysium (I cannot appoint scenes for your kids not to listen to because every scene has multiple swears.) However, I like that Elysium doesn't (really) overdo the profanity. There is plenty of it but not overly so unlike, again, Contraband!

As far as gruesome scenes, there are about 3 that I can think of. In one scene, a man is blown apart (not an explosion, just his guts flying everywhere.) In another, they kill a man by extensive shooting so his head flies off and bits of flesh fly everywhere. In yet another scene, while Max is knocked out and under anesthetic, they open up his head and there is very graphic visuals of tissue. The most gruesome scene of all is when Kruger gets his face blown off and then when they reconstruct his face. I will list the scenes here along with when your kids should close there eyes:

Exosuit scene (The scene where Max gets the exosuit. Get on edge when Max gets knocked out.)
Heist scene (Probably better for your kids to close their eyes when Carlyle's ship crashes.)
Last battle scenes between Kruger and Max (starts right after Max help Frey and her daughter escape the room where they were being kept prisoner.)
The scene where Kruger gets his face blown up. (Get on edge when Kruger start flirting with Fey and Max looks uncomfortable.)
The scene where they reconstruct Kruger's face. (Starts with Kruger lying on a stretcher and his two men bringing him to have his face rebuilt.)

If you want to see some of the most gruesome clips before hand, to see if they are too bad for your kids, click here (Man getting blown up RED BAND CLIP).