by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright August 2013
Elysium is District Nine on steroids. Which means the story is all about melodrama and heart-string pulling based on class warfare between rich, insensitive elite versus abused and helpless but resourceful "proles". As with District Nine, the director-writer, Neill Blomkamp, has whipped up a package of poetic license the size of a phone book. The inconsistencies would make Ridley Scott (Prometheus) blush.
That said, I've endured worse. The robot, medical and cyber-enhancement portrayals were inventive enough to be interesting. And the Elysium long shots were fun to watch.
Here are the biggest Technofiction problems I saw:
o This is a dystopian future, and it embraces the usual dystopian "worker paradise" stereotypes where the workers are poor and abused and the straw bosses are threatening them with job loss if they won't break safety rules. Likewise, the most effective people in Poor Town are the criminals.
For me, this portrayal gets tiresome because it's so inconsistent with a future where there's a lot of automation. When we have automation these low skill, dangerous jobs will be replaced by automated systems. The downtrodden workers of the future will be entertainers, waiters and call center cubicle types, not factory workers. The criminals will still be there, but their role will be corrupting the entertainment infrastructure and hacking stuff.
This Elysium-style dystopia isn't going to happen, which means we are seeing it strictly for the melodrama that can be created in this setting. And that's why it supports so many secondary inconsistencies.
o The "My kingdom is as big as a county"-effect. The most famous example of this is Star Wars. The Empire is a galactic-wide empire but we always see the same characters in episode after episode. This Star Wars "empire" acts as if it is the size of Hazard County in "Dukes of Hazard". Elysium suffers from this as well. Elysium is a huge orbiting space station, and Earth is a huge planet. In spite of their sizes the evil Head of Security has just one covert "heavy" she calls on. We see him and his ship... just him and his ship... patrolling all over LA. There is no sign of conventional police getting involved in any way either in LA or on Elysium. Related to this, when the story moves to Elysium and its various futuristic corridors and chambers, it acts like a small place. The characters don't move very far to get everything they need.
o Related to the above we have the "Distance? We don't need no stinking distance!"-problem. Early in the movie that covert heavy on Earth fires four missiles from a shoulder launcher and in just a few seconds they can zip all the way to illegal immigrant space ships that are near Elysium. And, yes, the space ships traveling back and forth always have their rockets pointed the wrong way -- as in, being right for flying through air, not the vacuum of space.
o When a shuttle ship crashes on Elysium late in the movie it doesn't punch through the outer shell, or even rip up any basement layers. Umm... maybe not. Maybe that outer shell is super tough because it has to hold off meteors. ...Maybe. But it sure was portrayed as a conventional hit-solid-earth crash.
o At the end of the movie, when the bad guys are defeated, a handful of fully equipped medical shuttles are sent from Elysium to Earth. Yay! Problem solved. ...But wait, a handful of medical shuttles will solve the world's problems? And these were already equipped and ready and waiting to be sent? This sure makes me wonder where the bleeding heart liberals among these Elysium rich were hiding at the start of the movie. Whenever you have a bunch of wealthy types gathered for a few years in a community you're going to have a large subset that want to help the poor in various ways. There's no sign of them in this movie.
In sum, the movie is all about melodrama in a class warfare format. The science fiction setting is built up around supporting that theme. It's a great movie if you love that kind of heart-string pulling. If you like science fiction that's about what future lifestyles are likely to be like, you'll be disappointed.
(If you want to see my vision of what near future lifestyles will be like, check out my book Child Champs: Babymaking in the year 2112.)
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