Trailers for Elysium were like catnip for the left-leaning viewer: a near future where the masses, stranded in crumbling cities, outfit Matt Damon with a robot suit and send him to fight the bourgeoisie, who have Galted off the planet to Space Station Elysium, taking their shrubbery, Spanish-style mansions and cancer cures with them. It promised to be an allegory about class struggle as transparent as director Neill Blomkamp’s first movie, District 9, was about racial apartheid. The 99-vs-1 narrative would finally get the sci-fi blockbuster treatment it richly deserved.

I regret to report that the final result is more decidedly mixed. It’s too bad, because Blomkamp is a director with a lot of talents. For a special effects guy, he retains an appealingly corporeal visual style. Bodies splatter in short sudden bursts of meat; parts of a crashed shuttle twist and dangle like one of Wile E. Coyote’s exploded contraptions. It’s miles away from the video-game-slick CGI and melodramatic slow-mo of your typical action movie product, with the ridiculous sturm-and-drang attached to every punch and explosion. Blomkamp’s vision of technology-enabled violence contains as much absurdity as it does tragedy. He shares this rubbery viscerality with his mentor Peter Jackson, and it’s a welcome respite from the smoothly functional technofascist superhero space operas that make up mainstream sci-fi.

Blomkamp also has a refreshingly straightforward take on race, no doubt tied to his South African upbringing. It’s a lot harder to talk about the “complexities” of race and class, like the mainstream media likes to do in the States, when you were born in a country where only the white tenth of the population could vote or hold office. Class, of course, remains incredibly tied to race, connected to all manner of material privileges (including not getting gunned down by cops and vigilantes). That the oppressed classes stuck on polluted and underdeveloped Earth are almost entirely brown and black, while Elysium is full of WASPs, strikes me as a bit of political courage that rejects any lingering vestiges of the “post-racial America” trop.