Neill Blomkamp created his own impossibly hard act to follow with District 9.
The 2009 flick started off as consolation prize for Blomkamp's Peter Jackson-produced movie of the Halo game franchise failing to achieve lift-off.
It ended up with a vast profit, Oscar nominations and earned the young South African director an instant fanclub, many of whom will be lining up to see what's he's done here with a vastly bigger budget, bigger names and some big ideas about where a world of Haves and Have-nots might be headed in 140 or so years.
What he's done is quite a lot, Elysium is a sci-fi action flick that might lack the originality of its predecessor but still thrills in its own refreshing, satisfying way.
Sure, its allegory about economic imbalances might be shouty and clumsy. And it does jettison story logic to get us to a clunky typical big action movie finale that is quite a bit dumber than what has preceded it.
