Part One: Elysium's Politics
Elysium looks cool, with its pervasive filth, massive disorienting cityscapes, and exoskeleton-related gore. I enjoyed watching it. I was never bored watching it either. And I guess I should say, I am a sucker for a simple (simplistic even) sci fi premise with a heavy-handed political message. And boy is Elysium that. But there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the politics of the movie, and it's not that it's too far left.
There's a scene near the beginning of the movie where Matt Damon's character goes into a room and he is exposed to a bunch of radiation, and then an alarm goes off, to let everyone know that "organic material" was detected in the blast room. Think about this for a second. Someone built a machine for irradiating materials. They then added an Organic Matter Detector, which detects organic matter in the chamber, but only after the radiation burns through the room. Why? Why would you design your machine to detect organic material in the chamber after the blast of radiation? The only answer I can think of is one that Elysium seems really comfortable with: Because you are evil.
I expected to feel a little awful after seeing this movie, because I thought it would make me think about privilege and wealth disparities and the very real lack of affordable healthcare for lots of people in the world. I thought it was going to force us to confront the fact that in this real world where we actually live, there are people who starve even though there is enough food for everyone. Those real life problems result from complicated, flawed economic systems. They are hard problems to solve, and worth solving.
But Elysium actually makes it easier to ignore these problems, because it allows its audience to utterly fail to identify with the bad guys. I'm not like her, I think. And as long as I'm not just plain evil, motivated solely by evil, I guess I'm one of the good guys. Or at least, I am not part of the problem. If the problem is "people who actively want to keep poor people from getting healthcare and good food out of pure malice" then I am definitely not the problem.
Part Two: A short list of cliches and confusions that bugged me about Elysium, apart from the politics problem.
1. Jodie Foster's character has this evil plan where she is going to install a program that will rewrite the government of Elysium. For a minute, I thought this meant that all of Elysium was some sort of Matrix-style virtual reality. But it's not. I think we're just supposed to believe that if a computer says President Patel is no longer president, then he will actually no longer be president. Why? How? (Note: someone said that maybe it's the law enforcement robots that get reprogrammed, so those robot guys will recognize Jodie Foster as president and do what she says.)
2. The threat of sexual violence as a motivator for the protagonist, because he cares about the victim. Because you see, the thing about sexual violence against women is that it's so hard on the men who love those women. Eye roll.
3. It is a little weird to me that in a movie that's all about class and poverty and inequality, the main character is Yet Another White Dude Who Saves Everyone. Read this
4. The replacement program, the one that the good guy hackers install instead of the evil one Jodie Foster was planning to install, declares all residents of Earth to be citizens of Elysium. That's cool. Even the part where the hacker changes a line of code, something like "earth residents status: illegal" to "earth residents status: legal." That's okay--I like heavy-handed. But it then displays the following error: "Cannot arrest citizen of Elysium." Seriously? They can't arrest any citizen of Elysium? For any crime? I guess? I don't think I want to live there.
