The future is Elysium – With Elysium, director Neill Blomkamp crafts a stunningly real, lived-in portrait of a dark future Earth.

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Like Orwell’s The Time Machine, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, auteur director Neill Blomkamp’s Matt Damin-led far future sci-fi epic Elysium is an unflinching portrait of the eternal struggle between The Haves and The Have Nots. In this case, The Haves are the world’s wealthy elite, the 1% country clubbing it on an extravagant space station paradise while the Have Nots scrum for meager scraps down below on our severely over-populated, overly diseased, perpetually polluted and crime-ridden planet.

As a roughneck car thief gone straight, Damon works the line in a factory churning out the robots that do everything from policing the Earth-bound rabble, to catering to every whim of the jelly-bellied citizens of Elysium. That is, until an accident on the job jolts him with a lethal dose of radiation.

With only five days to live, Damon must reconnect with his criminal cohorts and take on a dangerous mission in order to earn a chance to be smuggled onto Elysium where miracle-working “med beds” can heal just about any bodily sickness. But a stroke of luck lands Damon a chance to not only heal his crippling body but to heal the entire ecosystem of wealth, health care and power by bringing balance to the Elysium/Earth equation.

With Elysium, Blomkamp crafts a stunningly real, lived-in portrait of a dark future Earth, all grit, dust and shanty towns—and that’s just downtown Los Angeles. Above, his paradise is Kubrick pristine and palatial, eerily suburban and manicured and lifeless. Lording over Elysium is Jodie Foster’s icy defense minister who is tasked with keeping immigrants from the planet off of her space station by any means necessary, including dispatching seething killer Sharlto Copley (breakout star of Blomkamp’s Oscar-nominated debut District 9) to do her wicked bidding.

But while Damon brings real life and character to what could easily be a two-dimensional action hero, and Copley is verifiably terrifying as the villainous rogue agent, Foster is one of the weak links in this otherwise dramatic and surprisingly believable thrill ride. Her blank, aristocratic accent is a huge misfire, and throughout she feels unnecessarily detached from everything else going on around her. Emotionally cold does not have to translate as distant.

Still, Blomkamp proves again that he’s a young master of blending relational drama (Damon’s childhood friend and her young daughter stricken with cancer play a key emotional thread in his arc) with eye-popping, blood-curdling action sequences. Thematically, it is not a far leap to draw parallels between Elysium and the U.S. or other first world countries, and the realities of health care inequality and illegal immigration are summoned in the film, but only in the most organic and narrative-driven of ways.

Elysium may be flawed, but its enviable attributes outweigh any faulty ambitions. This is a thinking man’s sci-fi movie that never skimps on the action or spectacular Space Age effects. Watch the trailer below: