lots of reviews popping up now. if i were to be reductive, you could group them as follows:
POSITIVE REVIEWS: it works great as a piece of genre entertainment but it's a bit heavy-handed.
MIXED REVIEWS: it has a lot going for it as an action flick but the heavy-handedness of the storytelling undermines it too much.
NEGATIVE REVIEWS: it's heavy-handed and heavy-handed.
interestingly, i think there's a phenomenon occurring critically where Elysium is generally being appreciated by nearly everyone for its technical craft but losing points on both sides of the political divide because conservative reviewers are bugged to no end by the film's obvious political elements while liberal reviewers can empathize with those elements but are annoyed because they feel like the movie presents those ideas in a very unsophisticated, unrefined way, like they're mad at the movie for giving a straw-man argument of their own worldviews...which, i mean, it's a big-budget action movie that's trying to emphasize the visceral, i'm not expecting a ton of nuance and narrative deftness. as someone who's somewhat politically moderate, i'm wondering how much the allegory could possibly bother me, personally. it'd have to get really ham-fisted in the final act with multiple characters going off on minute-long, moralizing monologues for me to find it a big detraction.
heck, that kind of happens in TDK--though less politically, more just thematically--and that movie is still in my Top 50 of all time because it's such an effective and principled piece of genre filmmaking with some resonant ideas and Ledger's iconic performance. i'm not expecting as much from Elysium, but even if i can get mostly just the first part, "effective, principled genre filmmaking" to some degree with a small side of resonance, i will take that in a heartbeat. cuz, to me, that's a rarity.