Elysium – A Great Premise with Poor Execution
Elysium – an orbital habitat of unimaginable wealth and beauty, where only the privileged few are allowed to live. Elysium, a place of wonder and decadent corruption, where the rich look down upon the Earth that they have stripped of resources and hope, and casually exploit the only resource the Earth has left – man. Elysium . . . a sadly disappointing movie that really goes nowhere and says nothing important. But it is pretty.
Elysium is the latest film by Neil Blomkamp, best known for the sci-fi District 9. I loved District 9. It wasn’t the deepest exploration of racism that’s been done in sci-fi, but I thought it was a more than acceptable social commentary while still managing to be cool in a sci-fi adventure way. It was pretty, had a message I liked, and immediately went onto my shelf when the DVD came out. Elysium was a very similar movie in both plot structure and message, but I didn’t like it nearly as much.
When the movie begins we are told that none of the current social problems we experience now have been solved in the next century and a half and that Earth is now ravaged by overpopulation and wealth disparity. The rich live on a giant space station while the poor have been left behind.
The poor have virtually no health care, while the rich have magic medical tables they can lay on and be cured of everything, including aging. The poor of Earth regularly try to crash ships into the space station so they can make a break for one of those medi-tables and get their cancer or whatever cured before they are deported. I liked that the movie recognized that the entire population of Earth didn’t believe they could just go hide and live on the space station, and that getting deported was part of the plan.
Rich versus poor with a space station involved is an old hat sci-fi trope and generally works fine as a backdrop for another story. However, Elysium sets out to tackle this problem specifically, but it only does so in the most general and naive way possible. There is no examination of the fact that mankind does actually have limited resources, without enough to go around. There is no examination of the fact that the poor of the Earth make virtually no effort to improve their own situation (our sympathy for the main character is supposed to be created by showing that he is the only man we see no content to sit indolent or commit crimes). There is no examination of the fact that much of the decision making in society has been removed by the presence of robots as virtually all civic employees. What we basically get is “Rich people are selfish and bad and should cure everyone’s cancer.” Well, yes, thanks Neil. We understand those basic generalities, and we understand that you are in fact talking about the United States right now, not in a hundred and fifty years.
The characters also fall fairly flat. Matt Damon’s character Max makes a few stabs at being interesting, being willing to screw over basically the entire planet in order to save his own life, which I thought to be a fairly realistic reaction to the situation. The female love interest is generic enough that I can’t even remember her name, Jodie Foster is a completely hollow villain with a bad accent, and the guy that runs the coyote operation that Damon goes to for help is possibly the worst actor I’ve ever seen in an A-list movie, including Batman and Robin. Sharlto Copley is, however, awesome as always.
Where Elysium really shines, however, is the visuals. The design for pretty much everything is influenced by modern trends – the private ships look like sleek and expensive luxury cars. People dress in normal clothes instead of shiny space pajamas. The poor have extensive tattoo work, while the rich have designs literally burned into their skin in the instant scarification process that is demonstrated in the movie several times. The devastation of the Earth looks real. There are no smoking craters or burning buildings. Instead the damage is caused just by people everywhere, living normal lives. Garbage is everywhere, huge scaffolds have been built onto the outsides of buildings for people to live on, and there is no green anywhere to be seen. It is a terrifyingly real looking future, and one I can easily imagine us reaching (these days it’s harder to imagine us NOT ending up in that shit hole).
The largest failure of the movie is worth a special mention, and this is a huge spoiler (though not really) so stop reading if you don’t want to know the ending. The film ends with Damon making everyone a citizen of Elysium, and therefore qualified for automatic healthcare dispatched by doctor robots. Yay, all the poor people get free healthcare, we win! Except when you consider two things. One – there is no reason some rich guy couldn’t just push a button and cancel that up on Elysium. It was caused by a system reboot. The longest it would take them to fix that is like 24 hours. Whee, free doctors for a day, then everything goes back to shit. And two – the problems of the world are largely caused by overpopulation. Even if no one on Elysium cancels the health care being provided, the medical care will just MAKE THE PROBLEM WORSE. They didn’t fix anything in the end. All they did was doom mankind to an earlier extinction that they were already facing. Go team.
